Insurance and Financial Services
Automating decisions gives you a 'remote control' for your business applications
The Financial Services industry is well placed to benefit from the significant improvement in knowledge management, and the added integrity of knowledge processes, that IDIOM offers. Our customers have found that the mere existence of a complete inventory of business decisions, supported by system-managed definition of the decision formulas, is a valuable initial outcome.
The Financial Services Industry also offers some unique opportunities for leveraging IDIOM’s strengths:
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Configurable Product
Many of the products of the Insurance and Financial Services industry are essentially comprised of a series of computerized decisions, including:
- Data gathering, validation, and filtering.
- Expert derivations, assessments and calculations, including multi-level product pricing.
- Authorization, compliance checking, and workflow routing.
- Document construction.
Our customers have demonstrated that all of the product specific decisions that are required to implement insurance products can be implemented by IDIOM. This means that there does not need to be any code in the ‘host system’ that is product aware, creating the opportunity for systems to support dynamic product creation and deployment by business analysts. This concept is expanded in the White Paper 'Configurable Product'.
For systems that have been built with Configurable Product as a goal, full product specification (including generation of code for use in own and third-party systems) can be achieved easily and quickly, and deployed without writing or changing any computer code in the host systems.
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Legacy Systems Succession
The extraction of business knowledge from legacy systems into IDIOM results in an increasing inventory of core business knowledge within IDIOM, and a ‘dumbing down’ of the legacy system. By replacing the legacy system's business logic with interfaces to IDIOM, the legacy system can still access the logic – as can any replacement systems. By externalising the knowledge, and generating new interfaces for both old and new systems, a migration strategy is effected using IDIOM. At some point, the legacy system will retain minimal business knowledge, and will be able to be replaced without undue risk.
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Business Integration
IDIOM allows business processes to be shared with business partners. For example, an Insurer can supply a complete set of insurance decisioning to a Bank so that the Bank can automatically include insurance support for its financial products; and reciprocally, Banks can use the same capability to offer premium funding products to support insurance sales.
This allows a single customer interaction to represent multiple vendors, each with their own sales processes managed by IDIOM decisions.
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Claims
Claims are an area where 'decisioning' processes have been developed over many years, but are often not fully implemented as computer processes. IDIOM can support all routine claims decisions.
The decision quality can be further improved by developing a separate set of audit and compliance decisions to monitor claims, and to select and route claims for manual review according to management policies set outside of the claims function.
- Business to Business (B2B)
Many decisioning processes will support B2B applications. However, the intention here is to highlight that B2B involves data that has already been captured and is available in computer format. IDIOM can be used to create decision processes to manage and process that data without modifying the vendor's system to do so. And the IDIOM generated processes can be deployed to the Business Partner's system and/or your own, adding to the flexibility of the solution.