Accenture Unveils Enhanced Technology Solutions to Help Insurers Reduce Costs

NEW YORK – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has unveiled newly enhanced claims, underwriting and policy administration solutions designed to help property and casualty (P&C) and life insurers reduce costs and streamline insurance processes.

“In the current economic environment, reducing cost without jeopardizing future revenues is critical for insurers,” said Gilles Biscay, an Accenture senior executive and the company’s insurance solutions lead. “Our newly enhanced solutions are designed to provide advanced processing tools for insurers while lowering operating costs and reducing the time it takes to implement the solution.”

· The latest version of Accenture Claim Components Solution includes a self-service portal for customers and agents, extended workers’ compensation first notice of loss (FNOL), and new automated test tools, which can help insurers lower project costs and IT spending. A set of pre-built standard processes, patterns and tasks have also been added to help accelerate insurers’ return on investment.

· The new Accenture Insurance Solution — Accenture’s P&C product and policy management solution — provides multi-channel support, including an extended agent website with additional functionalities which cover all policy administration processes and offers one of the widest ranges of online support features available in a commercial product and policy management solution. The solution also includes a powerful business intelligence system which provides statistical analysis to help insurers manage their full insurance lifecycle. Among the new features are pre-configured products and processes to help insurers reduce the cost and time it takes to implement new policy administration systems.

· The upgraded Insurance Configuration Components Solution provides product development productivity tools to help manage product development projects and the release and deployment of those products to distribution channels and customers in a timely fashion. At a time when it is more challenging than ever to achieve profitable results, these features can allow insurers to bring new and modified products to market faster, helping them stay one step ahead of the competition.

· Accenture has enhanced the Accenture Life Insurance Platform, its industry-leading life insurance policy administration platform, by adding the capability to help insurers manage group benefit plans. In addition, the new solution has been modified to enable internationalization and to support more detailed product calculations.

“In addition to these upgrades, Accenture continues to invest in the flexibility of its insurance software solutions to enable insurers to select modules independently rather than implementing the full suite of software,” Biscay said. “Our objective is to provide insurers with a component-based policy administration solution with independent but interoperable modules that cover all core insurance functions and are designed to address insurers’ business requirements while helping reduce implementation time and risk.”

Listen to or download the audio podcast: An interview with Gilles Biscay

More information on Accenture’s newly enhanced insurance solutions appears below.

Accenture Claim Components Solution
The Accenture Claim Components Solution is a Web-based technology solution designed to help insurers improve the efficiency of their claims-handling operations through the automation of routine tasks. Currently used by more than 65,000 claims handlers worldwide to process approximately 40 million insurance claims each year, the Accenture Claim Components Solution supports core claims transactions from first notice of loss through to financials and reserve management. The solution can help insurers quickly react to market changes and new conditions through process configuration by the end user. Typically this can be done through changes in organization, patterns, assignment rules and task parameters.

In addition to the new automated test tools and the pre-built processes, patterns and tasks, the new version of the Accenture Claim Components Solution has been enhanced with support for portal architecture that can help insurers, as well as their agents and brokers, access claims for loss reporting or view the status of their claims. The enhanced solution can also extend the first notice of loss configurable, dynamic questions and answers process to the workers compensation line of business.

The upgraded Accenture Claim Components Solution can process more than 3,000 insurance claims per hour and support end-user response times of less than two seconds for 17,000 claims handlers at once, according to a recent performance test of the Accenture Claim Components Solution conducted by Accenture, Microsoft and HP.

More information about Accenture Claim Components Solution and Accenture’s claims services is available at: Accenture Claim Components Solution

Accenture Insurance Solution
The Accenture Insurance Solution is a modular, end-to-end, multi-language and multi-currency product and policy management solution that enables P&C insurers to use one single system across all the countries in which they operate. The solution, which enables highly configurable product and processes, can help insurers create innovative product portfolios tailored to their distribution channels, reduce costs and attract new business.

Among the new features of the Accenture Insurance Solution are:

* An extended agent and broker Web portal, which provides online support for quote and buy as well as self-servicing and a new quick-quote processing. New Rich Internet Applications (RIA) components have been added to help improve insurers’ Web front-ends with more-sophisticated capabilities.
* An enhanced architecture that uses the latest technologies such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) to help increase systems interoperability and service multiple distribution channels, including banks, aggregators and other third parties.
* An automated upload and download feature for product design, which can help insurers accelerate the time it takes to launch new products.
* A reinsurance application that is fully integrated with the policy administration and claims applications to help manage cessions and recoveries and fully integrated with the cash flow application to help manage reinsurance accounts.

More than 10 million policies worldwide are managed through the Accenture Insurance Solution, which is used by several insurers that operate in multiple countries to manage all lines of insurance businesses, including sophisticated commercial lines in the UK. Accenture Insurance Solution is used by RSA and other large insurers, as well as by large bankassurers including BBVA and Dexia.

More information about Accenture Insurance Solution and Accenture’s P&C policy services is available at: Accenture Insurance Solution

Accenture Insurance Configuration Components Solution
The Accenture Insurance Configuration Components Solution provides a next-generation insurance product development workbench that helps enable rapid product introductions and changes, utilizing leading third-party rules, rating and form production engines. The solution can provide insurers with a platform to externalize the business logic that currently resides in legacy systems so it can be easily managed by business users that define the product.

To further enhance the Accenture Insurance Configuration Components Solution, the new release can help position insurers for improved underwriting, product development and policy processing performance by providing:

* A project management function that can help insurers track the activities, personnel and progress of product development initiatives across the enterprise. This function can help insurers organize key product development activities and product components into a single view and provide a mechanism for comprehensive tracking of activities, ultimately enabling a rich audit capability.
* An integrated release management and deployment facility that can help enable business users to stage key product changes for rollout and allows IT users to manage the deployment of these changes to production environments. This capability can provide a mechanism for cleanly managing and tracking what product changes are released and when they are released, effectively helping to bridge the gap between the business and IT in this complex process. These capabilities can help provide insurers with more control over, and accuracy in, released product changes to help reduce errors that can tarnish both revenues and reputation.
* A flexible product development portal that can put key product development functions and data at the business users’ fingertips.

Safeco selected the Accenture Insurance Configuration Components Solution for its new commercial and personal product development system to help centralize and enhance its product development capabilities across all geographies.

More information about Accenture Insurance Configuration Components Solution and Accenture’s product development services is available at: Accenture Insurance Configuration Components Solution

Accenture Life Insurance Platform
The Accenture Life Insurance Platform is a fully integrated Web-services platform that can support the full policy lifecycle and help insurers improve life insurance administration and new business processing. Used by more than 60 leading insurers worldwide, including 27 of the top 30 US carriers, the Accenture Life Insurance Platform is designed to help carriers consolidate their back-office environments, streamline new business processes, improve service and reduce the time it takes to bring new products to market — all while reducing total cost of operation. As a scalable, rules-driven core business system, it can enable straight-through processing across the entire insurance policy and annuity life cycle. The solution can also help insurers rapidly deploy new life and annuity products.

The software can be used as a total solution or as components for specific core life insurance functions – from illustration and quoting to payout administration, including underwriting, policy issue and administration, and customer service. The platform is being extended to administer group life, short- and long-term disability and accident coverages as well as pensions and corporate-owned and bank-owned life insurance (COLI / BOLI) plans.

A large U.S. insurer is currently adopting the new functionality in the Accenture Life Insurance Platform. The technology implementation is part of the insurer’s effort to reduce costs and build a “platform for the future” by consolidating business and replacing its aging administration system with one designed to help enhance customer service and minimize costs.

The Accenture Life Insurance Platform is being modified to support interface and processing needs for international markets. In addition, the product engine is being enhanced to support detailed transaction, rider, coverage and policy calculations.

More information about Accenture Life Insurance Platform and Accenture’s life insurance services is available at: Accenture Life Insurance Platform

About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. With more than 181,000 people serving clients in over 120 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$23.39 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2008. Its home page is www.accenture.com.