About Microsoft in insurance
Microsoft refers to its focus in insurance as the "insurance value chain." This term refers to the benefits associated with linking and integrating systems that were previously separate. Microsoft and partners focus on developing standard-based solutions designed to integrate these systems, resulting in improved customer service and more efficient business processes.
In the insurance industry, Microsoft provides:
| • | Familiar Microsoft products that help employees monitor, optimize, and work collaboratively with new and existing business processes. |
| • | A rich partner ecosystem, for best-of-breed solutions that increase business agility. |
| • | Software and solutions with a pre-installed capability, which more easily integrates the insurance value chain. |
| • | Software the enables straight-through business process, which enables people to unlock the full value of information. |
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Insurance value chain
Insurance Value Chain solutions reduce information technology (IT) complexity and increase agility by enabling straight-through business processes which allow companies to access information throughout the insurance enterprise. Through the support of global and industry standards, Microsoft and its partners ease IT complexity, making solutions and processes easier to integrate.
If insurance is viewed as a series of interconnected business and system processes, the value that Microsoft and its eco-systems of partners can deliver to its customers is a series of seamless value added connections and solutions that provide increased agility, insight and cost effectiveness all along this process called the Insurance Value Chain.
| • | Channel Sales & Service: Insurance companies can create new channels and services to help them grow, retain and manage their best customers and producers with its integrated set of products and partner solutions while delivering products successfully and on a compliant basis to all of these channels. |
| • | Claims Processing: Microsoft addresses the critical needs of responsiveness, flexible workflow, detecting fraud and managing extended teams by providing effective collaboration and workflow which allows information sharing amongst all involved groups both within and outside the enterprise. By speeding the process through mobility at the point of claim and effective workflow behind it, costs can be reduced both for internal operations as well as third party service providers, fraud can be detected and prevented, and most importantly customer SAT and retention can be improved dramatically. |
| • | Underwriting: Processing at the core of the insurance enterprise, this solution provides systems such as collaboration, process management & business rules that accelerate underwriting workflow and lead to better decisions. |
| • | Core Policy Systems: Dealing with aging legacy systems that are largely mainframe and COBOL based that have been extensively modified and changed that they have now reached the breaking point. Microsoft's response in Core Policy Systems is to unlock the application and infrastructure savings to enable the business to offer new products and services in order to move the enterprise to becoming a People-Ready Business. |
| • | Product Development: To assist the insurance enterprise in dealing with product pricing and creation, Microsoft and its partners provides tools such as BI and market analytics to rapidly create and then configure new products & services. |
| • | Reinsurance: This process holds the global insurance industry together by supporting insurance exchange: Automatic Treat and Facultative Placement insuring the primary insurers against catastrophic loss by providing clean, accurate data on a very rapid basis to enable both the reinsurers, and the primary carriers that they support, to establish the pricing structures that they will use in the upcoming year based on the losses in years past. |
Enterprise risk management and compliance
Risk management and compliance focuses on delivering solutions that will enable insurance organizations to align their IT and business processes to meet risk and compliance requirements, achieve greater operational efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction. Microsoft and its partners also enable companies to integrate information spread across disparate systems for a holistic view of the company, thus empowering employees to identify and share best risk management and compliance practices.
| • | Document management and records retention: This approach provides version control capabilities, library services, and document level security features that span the entire document management lifecycle and ensure compliance with data storage, retrieval, archival, and disposal requirements leveraging partner solutions and the Microsoft platform. |
| • | Audit and controls: Microsoft and its partners help financial services firms put in place the effective checks and balances required to support compliance and governance efforts. |
| • | Risk analytics: A comprehensive reporting environment along with tools and features for business performance management, forecasting, trend analysis, and more with partner solutions that are built on SQL Server using reporting and analysis services. |
| • | Security and privacy management: A focus on balancing organizational risks and ever increasing external threats, which also considers regulatory compliance requirements. |
| • | Business continuity management: An approach to put in place alternative work practices and workflows—such as remote access technology, collaborative solutions, and segregation of critical workflows—to enable employees to provide basic functions remotely in case of incident or natural disaster. |
