1 January 2006

IT case study

Installing a two-way mirror

When Marsh went through its restructure in the UK the two main areas that it wanted to improve upon were transparancy and efficiency. It found that Acturis had the answer

On 1 August 2005, the 15 Marsh offices dealing with its commercial mid-market business began trading on Acturis. This "big bang" launch included Marsh accessing an integrated panel of insurers underwriting its core product offerings including commercial combined, contractors combined, motor trade, motor fleet, combined liability, excess liability, business travel/personal accident/sickness and combined engineering.

Ron Hayes, ceo of the Risk Trading Practice of Marsh, comments: "When Marsh went through its restructure in the UK, two important issues we wanted to improve were transparency and efficiency. We hope our new business model in conjunction with Acturis will help to achieve this."

Marsh went through a selection process that included a number of software houses and in May 2005 Acturis was selected.

James Roberts, coo of the Risk Trading Practice at Marsh, adds: "Acturis was selected for three reasons. Firstly, Acturis had built in a number of tools to help brokers deal with the Financial Services Auhority, and this coupled with the highly transparent nature of client files within Acturis made it ideal for a complex multi-office organisation such as Marsh.

"Secondly, Acturis already had a mechanism to transact complex commercial business in a connected way, and we recognised that we could maximise the full potential of this connectivity with our preferred panel of insurers. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we trusted Acturis to deliver to a tight timeline."

Fresh challenge

The first challenge was to get Marsh live and trading in time for the launch of its new structure on 1 August 2005. Theo Duchen, co-ceo of Acturis, explains: "As we were already in May, time was in short supply. We had two key challenges; firstly to migrate client and risk data across from Marsh's legacy system and train up all its users across the different offices; secondly to get its panel insurers live and trading with Marsh in a fully integrated way. Back in May this was a daunting prospect."

The project was split in two paths, internal Marsh go-live and insurer/product development.

The internal Marsh go-live was perhaps the easier of the two, as this was 100% within the control of Marsh and Acturis. The training plan was put in place and the data migration was scoped out and agreed.

Marsh took the additional step of employing a third party firm to manually migrate in additional risk information that could not be electronically migrated due to the fact it was not held in a structured way within its legacy system.

This meant that its staff ultimately went live on Acturis with a high proportion of data already loaded. The training was planned as close as possible to the go-live date, so that all the learning was fresh in everyone's mind.

The insurer/product development was always going to be hardest, as Marsh and Acturis were reliant on insurers, each with its own resource issues and internal pressures, but a core panel was live and capable of trading electronically from day one, and all insurers across the core products were live within a month of go-live.

Mr Hayes adds: "We are very grateful for the efforts of our panel insurers as without everyone pulling together in a very short space of time this project would simply not have been possible."

The key to the success of the connected panel is to remove re-keying of data between broker and insurer, thus reducing errors and vastly improving the speed and quality of service to the end-client.

The risk starts off in the Acturis System, as shown in the first screenshot (below). The bulk of this risk data had been migrated into Acturis before go-live. The Marsh client advisor then presses 'Submit' to send the risk information any attachments, such as a confirmed claims experience, to the selected underwriters.

The underwriters receive the risk presentation via structured email and then complete a quote form as shown in the second screenshot. All endorsements, terms and conditions, exclusions, warranties etc, are added as well as details of the premium, commission and insurance premium tax.

Solid structure

This quote form is structured and electronically linked into the Acturis System, such that the full quote details are received in the quote file without Marsh needing to key in the data, as shown in the third screenshot.

The Marsh client advisor is now in a position to communicate the quotes to the client, agree and bind the cover and send the client a register of covers without needing to re-key any of the data.

Dominic Hepworth, who leads the placement team for the Risk Trading Practice of Marsh, comments: "The pro-cess is transparent and at the centre we are capable of mon-itoring our core processes inst-antly and effectively. The management information we are able to use internally and in our dealings with our panel insurers is also first rate."

A new dawn

The important aspect to recognise is that this is just the start of the story not the end. A successful launch of a new IT system and process is only a stepping-stone in the direction of the true goal, namely a successful team of people using the IT to its full potential.

Mr Hayes concludes: "We know we can get far more out of the Acturis System, but the early months have been very positive. Removing re-keying of data, and thereby multiple paper trails, not only increases efficiency but extends the time we can spend continuing to add value to our clients."

Insurance Age

Return to Listings

Back to Top