Future trends and the insurance industry

Yesterday I travelled to Genève to partipate in the "Insurance Vision Day" arranged by the standards organizations of ACORD and UN/CEFACT in conjunction. The day was focused on discussing future global trends and the effect on the insurance industry and the role standardization could play in this.

The day was kicked off by futurist David Smith who gave his insight into some of the future trends and how he saw the possible effect on insurance. Later, Jürgen Heck, Program Director, Europe for ACORD gave his perspective from an insurance point of view.

"Customer-ization"
Actually this was a headline identified by the breakout group I participated in. The headline covers several unique trends all pointing to the fact that customers are becoming much more informed and is going to demand services (seemingly) tailored to them. The web 2.0 savvy customer do not only require 24-7 service at the fingertips, but is likely to expect insurance companies to cater for exactly his/her needs and offer products and services matching this. Obviously this will require much more than a corporate web site, and even possibly include offering outside normal insurance products. On my way home in the plane I happened to read about an actual example from Sweden, where the bank Nordea now is offering their young customers free music download besides their normal banking products. Much like TDC in Denmark is bundling music download as an integral part of a broadband mobile or ADSL subscription. For sure the new insurance customers must be met where they are being Facebook or other similar social networks. Apple already has some success selling insurance for their devices on Facebook. Perhaps we will soon see the first social network of people to organize their own “self-insurance”, perhaps all they need is someone to administrate and underwrite it… food for thought.

The aspect of catering to the customers need was not on the top of the list for ACORD members when asked by ACORD what the most important issues they were facing were. In fact, many other issues were brought which to me indicated a more internal view on things. Issues such as increasing sales, reducing costs, talent attraction and more were considered important. I personally believe the #1 issue for insurers should have been providing the best customer/user experience on the market. Simplicity when interacting with customers is the key to success. This requires the right products, the right communication, the best service and the right underlying technology to manage it all. The interesting thing is that the Insurance industry is one of few industries which have absolutely no physical goods as part of the business model. Everything can be digital, which in my mind shows a huge potential for improvement but also exposes a general lack of invention in the industry or willingness to exploit these opportunities.

The Islamic community
In a not so distant future (I forgot the actual year) it is predicted that as much as 25% of the European population will be muslim. This will for sure have an impact on the products and services delivered and those which can be acclaimed to be Halal (allowed according to the Islamic laws). Within insurance the ability to deliver takaful insurance (complying to the islamic rules for how to offer insurance) is a yet unrealized opportunity. This is obviously on top of the rest of the islamic population throughout the rest of the world. Just today in the radio I learned that a French burger chain has tremendous success opening new burger restaurants offering burgers strictly based on Halal meat…unfortunately for insurers this is not “merely” about defining a new product, but will impact the entire operation of the insurer and require a solution to match those demands (e.g TIA).

Standards
So what role does standards play in all of this? Well, for sure the future will bring much more electronic interaction - the ability to transact without paper requires lots and lots of standards for those transactions. The promise of standards will also bring lower costs to insurers, especially if those standards are implemented once and for all in standard solutions such as the TIA solution. In my opinion the road is however long and winding, since agreeing on standards across Europe – not to mention the entire globe – is a complicated matter. I would welcome few simple initiatives (standards) to kick it off, for instance – why don’t we have one common scheme for car manufactures to publish car make/model information…

At TIA we have a dedicated team worrying about local and global standards, implementing these whenever required. An example is the upcoming European standard for payment transactions (SEPA) which we are currently looking into (in it’s various local flavors).

All in all a good day where some interesting discussions took place, however without any clear conclusion or direction. The future of the insurance industry has yet to materialize

On my way for the TIA community conference

This years TIA conference for customers and partners is held at the Mövenpick Hotel, Amsterdam. Attendance is (again) record breaking and I am looking forward to meet customers and partners.

We have really made an effort this year to put together a professional conference with lots of information and dialog opportunities.

I sincerily hope that all participants will seize the opportunity to provide feedback about how we are doing at TIA Technology in terms of product development as well as support, professional services and other interaction.

At the conference we are going to talk about future roadmap, new initiatives as well as in-depth sessions of new features and functionality following the latest release 6.1 and the 6.0 release from 2009. All hands from TIA Technology will be on deck to participate in "meet the experts" forums. In general we believe this is close to being the largest insurance related conference this year taking place in Europe.

I believe the TIA Solution is showing the way in terms of standardizing the P&C insurance software and providing lowest TCO and fastest ROI on the market. The unique business model with the standard TIA solution localized for each market and being implemented and deployed by a dedicated partner network brings a great value proposition to customers and is highly scalable.

The TIA solution is growing in breadth and depth in terms of business functionality supporting increasingly larger insurers. The technology platform is likewise evolving with a new Service Oriented Architecture now capable of fitting into a complex heterogeneuos IT infrastructure. Based upon Java, the Oracle SOA Suite and the Oracle Application Development Framework with a central business logic repository in PL/SQL the solution is ready for the future while delivering unprecendented proven, stable, performing and reliable business process execution.

For those attending TCC 2010, I am looking forward to demonstrate all of this in details and I will see you Wednesday (partners) through Friday (partners & customers) for a jam-packed conference.

TIA release 6.1 has shipped

Just a brief note that we have released TIA version 6.1. More information is available for customers and partners at http://www.tiatechnology.com/

Programming in PL/SQL and Java

For those of you who have worked with the TIA Solution in more details, you know that the programming language PL/SQL for many years has been a central tool in the making of it. This is the language our business logic is written in, and it continues to serve us well in terms of features, performance and productivity.

Sometimes we meet people who are not used to the Oracle technology stack including the PL/SQL language. A few of those find it intriguing that TIA relies on a language “invented” many years ago. What we usually do is to explain the benefits of PL/SQL which we believe by far outweigh the drawbacks. Usually PL/SQL is being compared to slightly newer languages like Java or C#. The benefit to TIA Technology by writing business logic in PL/SQL is centered on productivity and performance. The TIA solution is an extremely feature rich integrated solution capabæe of supporting thousands of users, where most of the business benefits are based upon data access and manipulation of the data. As such the TIA solution is a traditional database heavy solution with less emphasis on advanced graphical user interfaces. Furthermore, we have deliberately made a choice only to utilize the Oracle database. Because of this we can utilize PL/SQL with all of its most advanced features inside the Oracle database to quickly get to the most optimal and best performing business logic with the least effort for the developers. We basically do not have to write any “plumbing” code to get the desired results in terms of updating the database. Compared to Java and C#, these languages do not have any elegant built-in runtime support for accessing a database. SQL statements have to be embedded in the code as textual strings and there is usually a lot of plumbing code which has to be written and maintained when writing business logic. And since TIA does not have to deal with the complexity of being database agnostic there is really no gain – just pain, should we choose to write business logic in Java instead of PL/SQL.

More information on PL/SQL can be found through Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/SQL). If anyone has a deeper interest in why PL/SQL is a good choice for an Oracle application like the TIA Solution, please check out http://www.developer.com/db/article.php/3308841/Sample-Chapter-Efficient-PLSQL.htm .

Now, the fact that most of the business logic resides inside the Oracle database and is written in PL/SQL does not mean that Java is out of the question. On the contrary, Java plays an increasingly important role for the TIA solution as a programming language. We have merely decided that we want to use Java where it is best, which we believe is for creating middle-tier components and user interface. To that end, TIA began the journey into Java land a few years ago, when programming for version 6.0 started. With the 6.0 release in March, the first real Java components were released, enabling TIA to fit into a modern service oriented architecture. We are now in the middle of releasing all of the services forming our service catalogue and of course Java plays a key role in that. This also means that our partners will have to look to Java to build up skills. Having Java knowledge and specifically experience with the Oracle SOA suite will become an important aspect of working with the TIA Solution in the future. And that will be amplified when we are gradually moving into utilizing the Oracle Application Development Framework to design and build the TIA solution.

We believe that it is wise for everybody to choose the optimal tool to get the work done. Do not use a hammer to drive in a screw.

When making the world’s best general insurance solution, we believe the right choice is PL/SQL for business logic and Java for the rest.

Version 6.0 released on March 31st!

As planned, we released the TIA solution version 6.0 on March 31st 2009. The software and other deliverables are ready for download through www.tia.dk for customers and partners.

This represents a significant milestone for us at TIA Technology and a leap ahead in terms of the Service Oriented Architecture we are introducing with version 6.

With the new release and subsequent releases 6.1 and 6.2, customers will benefit from a modern service oriented architecture which fit into a service infrastructure in order to simplify integration and customization of the TIA solution.

This will in turn lead to reduced cost for customers who want to plug TIA into an existing IT infrastructure and at the same time significantly reduce the time to market for new P & C business initiatives and products.

At TIA we are continuing to evolve the solution with new planned features for version 6.1 and 6.2 as well as the delivery of the entire service catalog, which is documented and described in detail with release of version 6.0.

At our upcoming customer seminar in Copenhagen, May 28-29, we will be presenting version 6.0 together with key messages about the future roadmap and plans. Included in that is several keynotes with focus on our customers and how they can expand through increased effectiveness and how we at TIA are dedicated to continued predicatability in or market offerings whilst maintaining agility to deliver immediate value in the current market conditions.

See you at the International User Group meeting, Copenhagen May 2009.

Version 6.0 progress report

With my first blogpost in 2009 I would like to send greetings to all my readers from a currently snow covered Copenhagen, Denmark. It's been a while since my last post, which primarily is caused by the fact that we are busy with the final stages of the upcoming version 6.0 as well as exciting new customer opportunities.

Currently the development team  at TIA is in the stabilization phase of version 6.0 which means we are system and integration testing the new features and the SOA arhitecture and completing the upcoming service catalog. We have completed the first test pass with succes and is currently fixing the remaining bugs found during this. Subsequently new test passes are planned before release currently slated for end of march.

Version 6.0 introduces a new Service Oriented Architecture as well as numerous application enhancements and features including a new module for complaints management. We are looking forward to presenting this and much more at our international user group conference - this time to be held in Copenhagen in May. 

In parallel with finalizing the new release, we have begun the envisioning phase for what comes next. With that, we are encouraging our customers and partners to provide feedback and ideas for new features, modules, enhancements etc. Let us know what you belive it's important we focus on through www.tia.dk, comment to my blog, by phone or mail.

TIA Newsletter

The December edition of the TIA customer newsletter was just sent out to subscribers. If you would like to receive the newsletter, please send an e-mail to support@tia.dk and we will add you to the distribution list.

The newsletter contains various information about the TIA product, company and community in general.