Insurance industry events and webcasts

A number of external forces, including recent economic turmoil and shifting customer expectations, continue to reshape the insurance industry. As such, it has become increasing important for carriers to be able to make changes quickly and enable their agents to do the same. There are competitive advantages available to insurers that are able to serve agents faster by providing them with better access to enterprise content management (ECM) capabilities.

Increasingly, the Web has become a key tool in meeting those goals. Unfortunately, many carriers do not have the capacity to develop a strong Web portal on their own. However, some insurers have found success recently by integrating their enterprise content management system with Microsoft SharePoint-- establishing a SharePoint Web portal through which agents can access documents and workflows, leading to:

• enhanced distribution channels
• increased underwriting efficiency
• superior customer service
• cost avoidance

This free webinar will be moderated by Insurance & Technology senior editor Nathan Conz.

AssureSign electronic signatures can be integrated into your policy management or claims administration system for seamless customer acquisition and management, enabling users to efficiently obtain signed policies within minutes, eliminating the cost and wait time associated with mailing or faxing.

AssureSign is built on an all-Microsoft platform, and is pre-integrated into Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft SharePoint, for quick implementation and seamless integration with your existing business processes. Learn how to streamline your business processes and secure signatures from prospects, customers, partners and employees within minutes, virtually anywhere.

This webinar should be of interest to business decision makers responsible for actuarial modeling and hedging programs, actuarial modelers using or considering using MG-ALFA, IT professionals responsible for supporting actuarial modeling, and IT managers interested in reducing the cost of infrastructure used in support of financial reporting and actuarial modeling.

In this webcast, Microsoft demonstrates how insurance companies can leverage existing assets in SharePoint Server and Office to manage business processes that have a mix of human and system workflow. Once those processes are managed, then inefficiencies can be driven out through real-time business data surfaced in a user friendly way. Microsoft will showcase an underwriting scenario that’s built on top of SharePoint and Office, and rendered through a next generation Silverlight web experience for an underwriting LOB manager. The business process data is ultimately surfaced and viewed through Microsoft business intelligence suite in an automated fashion. Microsoft technologies demonstrated in this session include, but are not limited to, Silverlight, .NET, Office, SQL Server, PerformancePoint, BizTalk, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Azure. Additionally, Microsoft will also show how rich business documents like Policies and Illustrations can be created through a centralized server-side process, but managed by business people through Office tools.

At this pre-recorded webcast, learn how Software as a Service and Cloud Computing represent new opportunities for the Financial Services industry and how it can enable customers to quickly adopt new business capabilities with minimal to no hardware and software investments. Join us to learn how Microsoft's Cloud Computing platform "Windows Azure" provides you with the opportunity to leverage a set of pre-built services on a robust and scalable technology infrastructure and migrate what you have today into the cloud to propel adoption of your solutions while accelerating your sales cycle and reducing implementation timelines and costs. While this will be a technical discussion, Microsoft will talk about how they see Azure benefiting the Financial Services industry and software partners in particular.

The current economic environment is forcing all financial institutions, including insurance companies, to reassess their IT strategies. While most carriers are not making radical cuts in IT budgets, it's more important than ever to focus investment in areas that can truly deliver value and payback by improving efficiency, addressing customer needs and enabling carriers to respond effectively to new regulation and market realignment. What are the critical solutions and tools that will help insurance companies take customer relationships deeper and quickly adapt to new operational needs?

In this Webcast, moderated by Insurance & Technology Editorial Director Kathy Burger, get an insider's view of some of the new solutions and emerging technologies and platforms that can help insurance companies be more competitive, responsive and profitable in today's tough financial services environment. Learn how to make the most of limited IT budgets and resources through strategic partnerships and investment in solutions that can be leveraged to address a range of imperatives, from compliance to product innovation to distribution effectiveness.

Forrester Research will provide guidance on using voice technology to meet your customers' ever changing expectations. Tellme will share its thinking on how to develop a true picture of the economic returns from deploying and maintaining an IVR solution.

Learn how Insurity has leveraged core data management products from Microsoft to create Reporting Decisions. Insurity's Reporting Decisions delivers powerful business intelligence (BI) capabilities uniquely predefined for property & casualty insurers by delivering prebuilt data models, BI Dashboards, key performance Indicators and reports based on years of experience delivering end-to-end policy solutions. Learn how today's tools can help you understand your business goals and measure your progress towards meeting them.
60 minutes

Microsoft Industry Technical Strategist, Colin Cole, dives deeper into the IVC Software Factory for ACORD Standards and demonstrates a next-generation web reference user interface that can be implemented today.

How can customers improve competitiveness? In this webcast replay, hear from Insurance & Technology's Editorial Director Kathy Burger, who discusses how parallel computational clusters are helping life insurance companies meet these increasing pressures to achieve more computing speed and capacity, and how High-Performance Computing is becoming a mission-critical capability in the IT strategy of every life insurance company. In addition, you will hear from Microsoft partner Milliman, Inc. and our customer on how they are addressing HPC in the Insurance industry.
59:05 minutes

At the 2009 ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum, Microsoft and key partners demonstrated how insurance organizations can realize the benefits of becoming a People-Ready Business with software that uniquely strengthens the capabilities and connections of people to create value in their roles. Through Microsoft's Insurance Value Chain, carriers can quickly adapt to a more competitive business environment by breaking down the barriers that prevent people, business processes, and systems & tools from executing with the maximum efficiency and expediency. By creating Connected Experiences that bridge the digital lifestyle and digital workstyle, you will be able to transform the customer, employee and operations experience, turn challenges into opportunities, and drive positive results.