How IT can help insurance process

Greater success can be achieved if more efforts are geared towards providing users a client-centric interface that manages the full policy administration lifecycles as well as enable users to easily access information in real time.

According to the Regional Manager, Insurance System Africa, Isaac Boateng, “Africa is a growing continent that can be improved upon if proper strategies and innovations are employed to ensure a user centric platform in the area of insurance and IT.”

Speaking at the launch of ISI Software in Africa that held in Lagos recently, Boateng said, “I see a lot of problems in communicating with insurance brokers. We always try to give added value and brokers want good services, competitive pricing and most of all stability. I believe that business and IT have to work closely together, and IT, sometimes, does not get the time of pushing business quickly, because it doesn’t always have the tools.

He noted that ISI enterprise is a fully integrated, web-based solution that enables carriers to increase productivity and reduce IT costs by moving to a single, scalable platform.

“ISI system would help insurance company to improve magnitude content of people that buy insurance, because of the efficiencies that lower the cost of the policy and it will also educate people on the importance of insurance and I believe with this it will make more sense to them,” Boateng said.

On how to avoid source code and quickly make changes, Boateng said, “without proper systems in place, little can be achieved. What we have done with ISI Software is to roll over and make the whole process seamless. People do not like change. Vendors go in with good intentions, but in the end, a good analysis is not done. The most important is the gap in the diagnosis. There are a lot of different systems, when you change one thing, there is a rippling effect, and the systems is made complex such that no one person can manage effectively.

“What I see in Nigeria is that the IT department, traditionally, has not been given the proper tool to execute its business plan, we are not blaming anybody, but frankly is takes a lot to build this software,” he said.

Highlighting one of the challenges in the insurance industry, Boateng said, “the biggest enemy we have seen in insurance systems is the ‘handoff’ where somebody has to pass it on to another who passes it on to another and this is what we are here to solve to integrate the departments.

“The ISI Software can automate fund and it is 100 per cent accurate. Everything is done on this system, you can send out SMS or email campaign to new clients. There is an integrated broker portal in the system.

“It is a nice way to decrease your expense ratio with a risk control system, which is now in over 70 companies in America. It is a system that can work on a laptop and mobile phones. At a high level all system do the same things, handle sittings, workflow activities etc. we have all these things in one integrated database.

Addressing guests, Boateng said, “if you are thinking of a new product you should use this. The system is confidential and secure. We typically do an implication system once a company likes our Demo. There are not many companies that we see that this system does not fit.

“We sell the software on different system based on the prevailing economy. We stop changing a large out front about 5 years ago. What we decided is to have a level price every year but it is very competitive.It addresses life policies. The Demo is free; we typically want to use web service. Data migration is a difficult process we have a complete methodology in ISI that completely deal with migration.”

Quality Assurance manger Enterprises for system Macedonia, Stefan Miteski, said, “one of our main tasks is quality assurance. We believe that quality is really important, we practice test-driven development, and one is a cost reduction measure when there is a new feature request, we test it on a daily basis with regression test. Automated test has made a huge difference in our quality insurance process.”