Banks and Insurers Capitalize on New Business Opportunities Through Co-Innovation with SAP and Partners

SAP Drives Innovation and Community Collaboration in the Banking and Insurance Industries by Delivering Solutions on Business Process Platforms.

In a continuing demonstration of the maturity of its strategy and road map to deliver solutions based on enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA), SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced details on how it is enabling business process platforms for banks and insurers to quickly identify and capture new business opportunities while creating cost efficiencies and additional sources of revenue. Through co-innovation with SAP and its partners, banks and insurance companies can have one integrated technology platform at the center of innovation and improved business processes. This helps in differentiating their value proposition, bringing new products to market faster and competing more effectively, while gaining market share, increasing profitability and transforming their business networks. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® ’07, SAP’s international customer conference, being held in Vienna, Austria, May 14 – 16.

Leveraging SAP technology and enterprise SOA, business process platforms for the banking and insurance industries bring together the SAP NetWeaver® platform combined with industry-specific, reusable enterprise services and business process elements to help banks and insurers capture opportunities faster, efficiently and profitably. Through a business process platform, business processes are repeatable and software-enabled, so a bank and insurance company can easily manage and update such processes—and do so at a lower cost.

SAP Powering Next-Generation Performers in Banking
The banking industry is the one of the first industries to achieve business goals by transforming business networks with solutions delivered on business process platforms enabled by SAP. The broad adoption of business process platforms in the banking industry is fueled by co-innovation with leading banks, including ABN AMRO and Standard Bank, contributing to the vision of how adaptable IT enables business growth.

“SAP’s integrated approach for the banking industry allows us to take components of our existing systems and plug them with other systems; This is the flexibility we needed,” said Herman Singh, director, Architecture and Technology Engineering, Standard Bank. “With the combination of the technology and the innovative strategy of business process platforms, SAP was the best choice for Standard Bank. SAP is going to be around for the long term. Not many people are.”

Standard Bank will drive the integration of 91 legacy systems, with more than 240 interfaces that include 11 million customer records leveraging banking solutions delivered on a business process platform. The integrated platform will help Standard Bank to improve sales and marketing performances, operational efficiencies, speed-to-market and, most importantly, customer experiences. “SAP has spent a tremendous amount of time to map our step-by-step approach to ensure our success,” said Singh. “We have started our journey towards flexibility, and the business process platform strategy will result in a single system of records for all our customer information and all related involved parties.”

SAP’s partners enrich the platform by adding services that contribute to the banks’ business—but not to IT complexity. SAP also announced today a planned collaboration to deliver world-class assess liability management capabilities that, through enterprise SOA, can be integrated seamlessly into business process platforms. (See related announcement at: http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.aspx?pressID=7710)

The industry value network (IVN) for banks is another example of co-innovation. The banking industry-specific enterprise services identified and defined by the IVN members are the reusable services available for business process platforms enabled by SAP. (See April 18, 2007 announcement, titled “SAP and Banking Community Definition Group Unite the Worldwide Banking Industry Around Enterprise SOA Standards.”)

“Working closely with banks and partners, SAP has successfully delivered a business process platform to help the industry reach increased differentiation and at the same time increased efficiency,” said Thomas Balgheim, head of SAP’s global Banking line of business. “With one integrated platform that includes reusable services and business process elements, banks now have an evolutionary, predictable approach to enterprise SOA where they can more efficiently manage their business operations.”

SAP Creating the Road Map to Becoming a Networked Insurer
In addition to demonstrated success in the banking industry, SAP also announced the enablement of a business process platform for insurance that will help maximize operational efficiency across lines of business and geographic locations to lower expenses, improve relationships with agents and brokers and increase satisfaction among customers. This marks another milestone in SAP’s endeavor to help insurance carriers transform their business networks to address their customers’ insurance needs, facilitate consolidation and comply with changing regulatory mandates.

“The paradigm of service-oriented architecture holds tremendous promise for the insurance marketplace, and it is a promise linked more to business transformation than to the technology stack,” said Mark Gorman, strategic research advisor, Insurance TowerGroup. “SOA promises a path to system consolidation, process flexibility, enhanced reporting and expanded analytics through independent, loosely coupled functional components dynamically linked to provide flexible, robust support for mission-critical business processes. With the combination of standardized services and an SOA-enabled enterprise business process platform, insurers can gain the flexibility they need to meet the expectations of the changing environment.”

By integrating processes throughout the insurance value chain on a business process platform, SAP takes insurers a step beyond standard processes for property and casualty, life and annuities, and health insurance. The business process platform for insurance enables carriers to rapidly respond to new business requirements and regulations while maximizing existing IT infrastructures. A business process platform for insurance offers a unique, risk-controlled innovation environment to develop new applications and services as well as to enhance existing processes for agency distribution, policy inception, collections and claims management. It also provides cutting-edge collaboration tools with both internal and external resources, resulting in tighter integration with the varied stakeholders in the insurance value chain. It further creates optimal business and IT governance processes, resulting in a lower total cost of IT ownership.

“Transforming an insurance business requires an IT environment to provide efficient, end-to-end processing, as well as strong workflow and configurable business-rules engines for such functions as auto assignment and event triggers,” said Leo Schneider, senior vice president, Financial Services, SAP AG. “SAP offers insurance solutions and enterprise management solutions based on enterprise SOA, empowering insurers with a single, scalable business process platform. The platform leverages the co-innovation of SAP and its ecosystem of partners to help insurers achieve the operational efficiency and flexibility they need to capture business opportunities quickly in this rapidly changing industry.”