Risk management and business insight are key functions of any insurance organization, and are extremely crucial aspects for a large company with many complex lines of business.  As part of a massive overhaul of its technology systems, our client underwent a large-scale modernization effort that focused on adopting and consolidating systems into new technology using Microsoft-centric software and hardware platforms.  We created a consolidated automated underwriting system on the Microsoft.NET platform that will ultimately combine the existing underwriting components into one comprehensive system – supporting new business transactions for specific policies and include infrastructure to support the current processes being developed in future project phases.

Background

Our client is a large property and casualty insurance company that supports several lines of personal and commercial insurance, with a policy count ranging in the millions. Insurance carriers face information overload and data sprawl in their day-to-day operations, needing more modern and capable business intelligence and risk insight systems.  For our client, error-prone manual processes impacted the accuracy and integrity of their underwriting modeling. Their mainframe underwriting systems had become inflexible and costly to enhance.

Challenge

Recognizing the need to improve profitability and loss ratios, our client looked to expand their risk management into fraud detection. Given the large volume of quotes produced, the underwriters wanted to further interrogate the data, providing insight into any discrepancies in information gathered from the customer, with a solution that would detect fraud early in the sales process. However, the underwriting system was incapable of cost-effectively implementing this type of business innovation.  AIS was challenged with providing underwriters the ability to put together new customer/risk models with a better user experience and evolve those models for continual risk management.

Solution

Our first order of business was to replace the inflexible, underwriting system with a system built on the Microsoft technology platform. Given the large volume of underwriting transactions, this platform supported the demanding performance requirements of the demanding underwriting system. Built as a configurable, data-driven solution, the new underwriting system allowed underwriters to make changes in a more efficient manner.  Subsequently, the new underwriting system was enhanced to allow underwriters to expand their customer/risk models for fraud detection. The skill sets needed to make these enhancements were readily available in the market, and will be for many years to come. Future phase enhancements will include analysis and insight into “dead” portions of the risk models – i.e., historical functions that still exist, but no longer serve a purpose. These enhancements would not have been possible on the previous platform.

Business and Technological Advances

As a result of the implementation of the new underwriting platform, the organization experienced substantive growth.  Business advances include:

• An increase in policies from year to year
• Improved risk management assessment process
• Enhanced confirmation model for better fraud detection

With use of the Microsoft .NET platform, the organization was able to see advances in system integration and automation.

Technology

•  .NET Framework 4.x
• Visual Studio 2012 / C#
• SQL Server 2012
• Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Services

Enhanced risk management for a large property and casualty insurance company.