Insurance Sector - Escape velocity

The issues

This market leading Central and Eastern European insurance group has expanded rapidly in just 11 years from its origins as a pair of smaller single country-focused players. With a newly found reputation for innovation, this Insurer has grown to about £5 billion in annual premiums and over 20,000 employees, with active presence in twenty CEE countries. Yet with the founding of a new company and brand, market recognition in home markets was low. And the Board eyed expansion into new markets.

This challenged their legacy IT systems. A mainframe based ASF system was used to handle customer correspondence ­ however, it was found that the system lacked the functionality to manage the growing business requirements and was becoming difficult to support effectively.

Additionally, much of the decentralized printing and further correspondence handling depended on significant manual intervention. Furthermore, record archiving of some nine million pages per annum relied on expensive optical solutions.

Thus, a responsive, effective, replacement system was required to address a number of cost and performance needs across the group.

The icon solution

icon was selected as the solution provider and utilising icon Suite’s software the migration from legacy ASF based applications to one centrally maintained solution was straight forward.

The solution is now being used not only for batch processing and the decentralized formatting of documents, but all created documents (interactive, process-integrated and batch) are being centrally processed, printed and archived automatically in TIFF format.

Additionally, employees writing business in associated agencies are creating documents, too, via a flexible web application.

The supporting infrastructure includes frontend client on Windows with a backend Linux-Server, DB2 under z/OS, MS-SQL environment.

Client Benefits

• Significantly improved business processes to support new initiatives - all employees working with the same text systems, based on one central and easily maintained template repository
• Recognisable cost and time savings - as the group utilises one system to create documents with flexible access to the central insurance applications
• Sophisticated communications help achieve the highest levels of brand recognition in many markets, despite pursuing different positioning strategies for its key markets (Western versus CEE)
• Infrastructure and licence costs reduced with the new system running on a fully supported environment based on standard software
• Automated capture of all transactions securely recorded at a much reduced cost