Issue 2004-8:   February 24, 2004

This newsletter is for members of the Canadian Insurance Industry, and those who serve it. The newsletter is published weekly, and notes information mostly about the use of the Internet and related technologies in the industry. Some is international, where we feel it is relevant to Canada.

Statistics and Reference

North American Life Insurance Off 5.3% in January: MIB.

January applications for life insurance in North America declined 5.3% year-over-year. In the U.S., January applications fell 5.7% with Canadian activity off 1.6% compared to the same month last year.

CSIO Insurance Portal Status Update

Week ending February 20: David Patrick at our seminar last week indicated that the 16 brokers in the alpha/beta testing stage are continuing to work the system hard. This push will make it easier for the next wave of brokers.
Portage Mutual and Peel Mutual have committed to the Portal, but have not yet delivered their rates for loading.

Policy Management

GeniSys® is selected as a finalist for Outsourcing Centers prestigious Outsourcing Excellence Awards.

GeniSys, a market leading Business Process Outsourcing firm specializing in policy administration solutions for the life insurance industry, is thrilled to announce that their relationship with Unity Life of Canada has recently been selected as a finalist for the Outsourcing Excellence Awards given out annually by the Outsourcing Center. The nomination highlights the tremendous strategic and operational role GeniSys has played in the success of Unity Life of Canada, one of the fastest growing life insurance carriers in Canada.

Property/Casualty Reinsurance Cedent Technology Strategies: Report Published by Celent.

Insurance technology investments too often bypass reinsurance departments, leaving them technologically challenged, hurting financial results and even putting surplus at risk. Celent estimates that new strategies and solutions can help ceding insurers increase their recoveries by 2%-4%, or US$420-840 million industry-wide per year.

Guy Carpenter Develops Industrys First Frequency and Severity Model for Analyzing U.S. Publicly Traded Directors & Officers Liability Risks.

In response to insurance companiesneed for more effective tools to manage their Directors & Officers Liability Insurance (D&O) portfolios for U.S. publicly traded companies, Guy Carpenter & Company, Inc. announces the launch of the industrys first model for analyzing and forecasting the frequency and severity of securities class action suits, which account for the majority of D&O insurersloss activity.

Insurance and Financial Services Products

RBC Insurance Launches Innovative Life Insurance Product.

RBC Insurance is launching a new life insurance product that will offer the security of permanent life insurance along with the benefits of flexible investment options. The RBC Insurance Foundational Life product offers an economical option for purchasing permanent life insurance protection in a variety of amounts that are lower than most traditional universal life insurance policies.

ING DIRECT has done it again...now our RSPs are not only the best value in Canada, they are the simplest.

ING DIRECT, the Canadian bank famous for revolutionizing the way Canadians save their money, is now revolutionizing RSPs by replacing complexity with simplicity. Among ING DIRECT's high value RSP investment options are the Investment Savings Account and GICs with the highest interest rate today of any of the big banks, and an impressive selection of mutual funds from some of Canada's top performing fund families. Needless to say, all of these options come without sales and transaction fees or service charges.

Managing Relationships - Customer Service

E-Delivery Fails to Deliver: Dalbar study.

While use of electronic delivery (e-delivery) can replace billions of dollars spent on paper, printing and postage, the promise of these savings has been pursued with disappointing results since e-mail and the Internet have become commonplace. The last five years has shown that the enormous cost savings through e-delivery remain elusive and expensive to implement.

DWL Customer" Achieves Unprecedented Performance Levels on IBM Infrastructure in Latest Benchmarking Tests.

DWL, the leader in enterprise business services software, today announced the results of performance testing conducted on the leading enterprise customer hub, DWL Customer ". Based on the results of the peak performance tests and linear scalability tests, DWL Customer has proven to meet the demanding performance requirements and outperformed all existing statistics for an application of its kind.

Distribution

Second Study Confirms that Distribution-Driven Insurers Grow at Twice the Voluntary Industry Rate: Eastbridge.

For the second year in a row, companies in the voluntary (worksite) business that use a distribution-driven strategy grow far faster than their peers. In fact, their results were even greater in this year's study as compared to past years.

Claims

Crash Tests are Good Predictor of what will Happen to Occupants of Vehicles in On-road Crashes: IIHS.

Drivers of vehicles that earn good ratings in the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's 40 mph frontal offset crash test are much less likely to die in serious frontal crashes out on the highways, compared with drivers of vehicles rated poor. For the new study relating vehicles' crash test ratings to real-world fatality risk, Institute researchers examined 12 years of records from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, a federal database of all fatal crashes on U.S. roads, and identified the crash-involved vehicles that had been rated in the offset test.

from Doug:

The seminar last week on P&C insurance distribution in the broker channel went very well, with very good feedback. Many dependencies, from technology like the Internet, XML and Web Services to company and broker systems' functionality, have been or are being addressed. The CSIO Portal also plays a role in moving towards a greater degree of integration among the various parties. Progress is being made on many fronts.
Our next seminar on bodily injury, disability and even less complex health claims is coming up on March 25: Improving Claims Processing: Focus on "People" Claims - join us.