4 Presidents' Day Weekend Contracts

While much of the country enjoyed a brief respite from business life, several insurance companies were hard at work putting the final touches on contracts with new technology providers.

Bloomington, Ill.-based COUNTRY Financial selected New York-based MajescoMastek’s STG Billing platform to replace its legacy billing system. The insurer, whose personal lines include auto, home and agribusiness, will also use MajescoMastek’s Insurance Content Manager toolkit to maintain its own content for business rules, security access control and other configurable data.

“We were impressed with both the technology and the breadth of functionality offered with the MajescoMastek system,” Alan Reiss, SVP of service operations with COUNTRY Financial, says in a statement. “The implementation is already under way and is going well. We look forward to taking advantage of the system’s rich and flexible capabilities and believe that once in production the new system will enable efficient billing processing and make for a quality billing experience for our policyholders and our financial representative community.”

[Read about COUNTRY's new personal lines policy administration system it selected in late 2011.]

Kentucky National insurance (Lexington, Ky.) will use the Stingray System from Maximum Processing (Bradenton, Fla.) for policy, billing, claims, imaging and reinsurance processing across all lines of business.

"We were impressed by the Stingray System and all the features and functions that are offered. We were further impressed during our discovery process with the staff and their knowledge and understanding of our business and our needs," David McMullen, President of Kentucky National Insurance, says in a statement. "The Stingray System will allow us to offer a richer environment via the web and improve the service to our agents and customers while improving the productivity and efficiency of our staff."

Maximum Processing president and CEO Sean Pitcher noted that Kentucky National will also "be able to provide real time purchasing capabilities to their agents and customers while gaining the ability to react to the marketplace quickly" using the platform's IVANS integration.

[Kentucky National will download information to its distributors' agency management systems using the Stingray platform, but do agents actually prefer carrier portals? Check out where carriers, vendors and agent groups stand on the debate.]

San Mateo, Calif.-based Guidewire now counts Peoria, Ill.-based RLI among its ClaimCenter customers. HCL Technologies will assist RLI with the implementation.

“Throughout our search for a new claims system, we were principally guided by the need to get better insight on loss data and to further automate our claims process. ClaimCenter provides an attractive combination of usability and long-term flexibility to keep up with business demands,” Murali Natarajan, RLI VP of Information Technology, says in a statement.

Natarajan was promoted to the top IT post at RLI following former CIO Carol Denzer's promotion to VP of underwriting late last year. Guidewire's last reported ClaimCenter contract was with Lansing, Mich.-based Auto-Owners Insurance.

Middlebury, Vt.-based Co-operative Insurance Companies, which specializes in farms, rural properties and small commercial risks, will use iPartners' (Atlanta) Insurance Scorecard for business intelligence. Co-operative saw a need to improve the quality and depth of information being provided to its executives to provide greater visibility into the business and better decision making, but lacked in-house BI expertise or available staff.

“We have been thinking about improving our BI capabilities for some time. We set up a demo with iPartners and were very impressed with their capabilities. The fact that they had broad experience with our particular policy management system, CSC’s Point System, clinched the deal,” explains Dave Tatlock, Co-operative CFO, in a statement. “We were also excited about their business model, which has us provide data, but has iPartners doing all the heavy lifting."

[Analytics expertise is increasingly becoming table stakes for insurers. Check out our conversation with Chartis' new chief science officer, Murli Buluswar, in which he explains why the insurer devoted an entire position to the study of data.]

Nathan Golia is senior editor of Insurance & Technology. He joined the publication in 2010 as associate editor and covers all aspects of the nexus between insurance and information technology, including mobility, distribution, core systems, customer interaction, and risk ... View Full Bio