Complex Data Exchange and Insurance

Attempts to streamline communications across the insurance industry ecosystem have historically been complicated by a number of factors, including:

Fragmented and Complex Distribution
Channels consist of agents and distributors with varying levels of enabling technologies and requiring multi-carrier capabilities.
Multiple Insurance Lines
Differences across life and annuity, property and casualty, and other business lines including regulatory requirements, forms, and transaction standards such as AL3, ANSI X12, NAILBA, SEMCI, etc.
Legacy Technology Investments
Significant prior investment in costly, proprietary enterprise systems for core business applications.
Cross-Industry Relationships
Exchange of information with a range of trading partners across industries and needs to accommodate standards such as DTCC in financial services, HL7 and HIPAA in healthcare, etc.
Solution Adoption
Lack of a comprehensive and pragmatic solution ready for industry-wide adoption.

Faced with increased competition, performance pressures and customer expectations, and with opportunities to leverage new business relationships globally, the organizations in the insurance industry can no longer absorb increasing costs and complexity when standards are lacking or are not widely implemented. These costs are felt in a range of areas, including manual data re-entry, expensive custom coding to integrate applications, protracted processing, and inadequate customer service to name a few.

The widespread adoption of XML as a technology for driving standardized information sharing and increasing industry support for global industry standards–ACORD XML in particular–is driving broader business integration across the insurance ecosystem.

Insurance industry consultant Celent has estimated that broad adoption of ACORD XML could save the insurance industry $250 million in technology costs annually.

Complex Data Exchange Solutions for Insurance
Informatica's next-generation complex data exchange technology provides a powerful solution for improved communications, standards adoption and other challenges in the insurance industry. Specific Complex Data Exchange solution capabilities include:

Support for multiple ACORD transaction standards including continued use of ACORD AL3 (an EDI standard used in property and casualty) and ACORD XML with standards defined for multiple business lines.
Support for communications with business partners in other industries using multiple transaction standards such as EDI X 12 and EDIFact, HL7 in healthcare, DTCC and SWIFT used in financial services, etc.
Support for a broad range of other data formats frequently encountered in business integration including unstructured data (e.g., document formats and print streams) and semi-structured data (e.g., advanced COBOL and proprietary implementations of standards). Click here for a full list of data formats supported.
Ability to embed Informatica data transformation for runtime execution in most distributed software infrastructure platforms including leading integration brokers, content and document management platforms, application adapters, and software applications built on J2EE, Microsoft .NET and native OS environments.

Key Technology Standards Support: