evolving opportunities
Can Scyllogis Consulting’s data solution keep its
insurance client at the forefront of its market?
Tokio Marine Europe offers tailored commercial property,
the ease with which data drawn from the
casualty, marine and personal accident/travel insurance solutions
agents and branch offices can be interrogated
and assessed.
to a wide range of business sectors, supported by experienced
Chris Gordge, the Chief Information Officer
claims handling and effective risk control strategies.
of Tokio Marine Europe, explained that the
company has a policy of running industry-
Tokio Marine Europe Insurance Limited was leading insurance applications on established
formed as a controlling company for the Eu- platforms. “There is a single network across all
ropean operations of Tokio Marine and Nichido our offices, which avoids potential problems of
Fire Insurance Co. Limited, which is recognised integration at that level. All our offices bar one
as Japan’s oldest and largest commercial prop- use an underwriting support system running
erty, casualty and marine insurer, and is a mem- on an IBM iSeries server network.”
ber company of the Tokio Marine Group. The software in question is the GENIUS In-
Tokio Marine Europe was originally estab- surance platform from Xchanging. This is a
lished to service the interests of Japanese highly configurable system used extensively
companies operating in Europe and has since across the insurance sector. GENIUS appears
expanded to provide similar high quality prod- to have supported the company’s activities
ucts and services to local companies. well over the years.
With a network of offices and agency repre- Tokio Marine Europe is committed to this
sentation throughout Europe, Tokio Marine best of breed application and has recently
Europe provides a range of insurance prod- upgraded one of its iSeries servers to sustain
ucts and services in the UK, Belgium, France, its investment in the established and well-
Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain. proven technology.
Within a number of those territories, the lo-
cal office manages a network of agents who
are effectively franchised to write insurance
Problems with data flow from agents
cover under the ægis of Tokio Marine Europe. Interfacing various front-end systems used by
Tokio Marine Europe’s agents in the field with
Drawing in data from agents
the GENIUS back-end application is where
skills in systems integration are required.
At the end of each month, the agents summa- The agents write insurance contracts within
rise the transactions which they have com- criteria specified by the insurer and submit
pleted and pass these on electronically to the what are known in the industry as bordereau
insurer’s back office system. statements which summarise each of the
The ability to run an insurance operation transactions handled in the preceding month.
competitively depends at least in part on the The fact that agents, as organisations, are
quality of information within its systems, and dependent on their own internal systems can
present issues when Tokio Marine Europe re-
quire them to submit that data in a particular
format.
As Mr Gordge observed, much of the trans-
action data leaves the agents’ systems as Ex-
cel spreadsheets, requiring conversion to a
standardised format before it can be integrated
with GENIUS.
The number and diversity of interfacing
solutions in use at Tokio Marine Europe had
increased steadily over the years, as new
6
The Informed Executive
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