Leading Chinese Insurer Taiping Life chooses ILOG JRULES for its Underwriting System
Announcement posted by ILOG 16 Feb 2006
ILOG (NASDAQ: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN:FR0004042364) and Shanghai FirstTech Co. Ltd. (FirstTech) today announced that one of China's largest and fastest growing life insurance carriers Taiping Life, has based its new insurance underwriting system on ILOG JRules(TM), a key offering in ILOG's Business Rule Management System (BRMS) product line, to help streamline its underwriting process. The ILOG JRules-based underwriting system was developed by FirstTech, a leading Shanghai-based systems integrator, and ILOG's partner for metal, semiconductor and insurance solutions.
China is a rapidly growing market for insurance products with a year-over-year growth rate of approximately 25 percent. This dynamic market created challenges as well as opportunities for Taiping Insurance. Product lifecycles were decreasing, while the requirements for localization, standardization and automation were increasing. The carrier needed an alternative to improving efficiency without increasing the size of the order processing team.
Taiping Life uses ILOG JRules throughout the underwriting process from eligibility and risk assessment, to rating and referrals. Since the system was implemented, more than 60 percent of new policy applications can be processed automatically. The overall processing speed and capacity have been dramatically enhanced as well; it now takes only 0.2 second for Taiping Life's underwriting department to process an insurance policy application. The new rule-based system can also process 432,000 insurance policy applications within 24 hours, equivalent to the daily workload of 2,000 underwriters. Taiping Life's ILOG JRules-based underwriting system can be expected to accommodate the different requirements of each region with zero processing errors, compared with the manual process. Furthermore, ILOG JRules allows rule changes to be maintained separately from IT systems, and even be accessed by policy managers. Thus, the rule updating cycle has been reduced to several minutes from the several days it took previously.
Taiping Life contacted ILOG and FirstTech in June 2005. After a stringent round of evaluations, Taiping Life eventually selected ILOG and FirstTech for the project. Within just three months, the first application -- the new contract insurance policy application processing module -- went live.
"Insurance processes are highly rule-intensive, especially in such aspects as insurance policy application processing, quote, claim settlement, and product selection and recommendation. Asian carriers have to adopt advanced IT systems to manage these processes effectively and keep competitive in the fast-moving market" said Mr. Wang Xin, deputy general manager, Taiping Life. "Joining other leading insurers throughout the world that have embraced a BRMS to streamline everything from claims to underwriting, Taiping Life is the first company in China to utilize this powerful technology to boost productivity and provide our clients with faster, more convenient and more personalized service."
Since the ILOG JRules-based underwriting solution has proven successful, Taiping Life plans to expand the use of the BRMS to claim settlement service and other business areas.
"The Taiping project is the first combination of FirstTech and ILOG's capabilities in the Asian insurance market and it has solidified our close partnership," said Winston Chang, CEO, FirstTech. "With ILOG's leading edge technology, and FirstTech's competitive and high quality resources, we will reach out to more customers together in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan in the near future."
China is a rapidly growing market for insurance products with a year-over-year growth rate of approximately 25 percent. This dynamic market created challenges as well as opportunities for Taiping Insurance. Product lifecycles were decreasing, while the requirements for localization, standardization and automation were increasing. The carrier needed an alternative to improving efficiency without increasing the size of the order processing team.
Taiping Life uses ILOG JRules throughout the underwriting process from eligibility and risk assessment, to rating and referrals. Since the system was implemented, more than 60 percent of new policy applications can be processed automatically. The overall processing speed and capacity have been dramatically enhanced as well; it now takes only 0.2 second for Taiping Life's underwriting department to process an insurance policy application. The new rule-based system can also process 432,000 insurance policy applications within 24 hours, equivalent to the daily workload of 2,000 underwriters. Taiping Life's ILOG JRules-based underwriting system can be expected to accommodate the different requirements of each region with zero processing errors, compared with the manual process. Furthermore, ILOG JRules allows rule changes to be maintained separately from IT systems, and even be accessed by policy managers. Thus, the rule updating cycle has been reduced to several minutes from the several days it took previously.
Taiping Life contacted ILOG and FirstTech in June 2005. After a stringent round of evaluations, Taiping Life eventually selected ILOG and FirstTech for the project. Within just three months, the first application -- the new contract insurance policy application processing module -- went live.
"Insurance processes are highly rule-intensive, especially in such aspects as insurance policy application processing, quote, claim settlement, and product selection and recommendation. Asian carriers have to adopt advanced IT systems to manage these processes effectively and keep competitive in the fast-moving market" said Mr. Wang Xin, deputy general manager, Taiping Life. "Joining other leading insurers throughout the world that have embraced a BRMS to streamline everything from claims to underwriting, Taiping Life is the first company in China to utilize this powerful technology to boost productivity and provide our clients with faster, more convenient and more personalized service."
Since the ILOG JRules-based underwriting solution has proven successful, Taiping Life plans to expand the use of the BRMS to claim settlement service and other business areas.
"The Taiping project is the first combination of FirstTech and ILOG's capabilities in the Asian insurance market and it has solidified our close partnership," said Winston Chang, CEO, FirstTech. "With ILOG's leading edge technology, and FirstTech's competitive and high quality resources, we will reach out to more customers together in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan in the near future."