29 October 2008

Established in 1997, Towergate Partnership has expanded rapidly, both organically and through acquisitions, to become Europe’s largest independently owned insurance intermediary. Towergate Underwriting is the group’s virtual insurance carrier, undertaking all the functions of an insurance company.

Acquiring an average 1.5 companies per month left Towergate Underwriting running on around 30 different systems, often with separate companies using different processes and procedures entailing major differences in the way the systems were used. In order to support its growth and to design, build and market competitive insurance policies more quickly and efficiently, it needed to overhaul its technology.
Towergate looked to consolidate its underwriting systems onto one standardised environment, giving staff better access to real-time information and enabling underwriters to see their products built or amended faster. It worked with RDT to evaluate its requirements. In October 2006, after a successful proof of concept, RDT developers worked with Towergate business analysts to enhance RDT Landscape.NET to meet the documented requirements.

The solution went live in March 2007. As well as enabling the fast configuring and deployment of insurance products, it delivers full accounting functions; workflow events and business documents; broker administration; full policy production and administration; claims handling; business intelligence, and full cycle electronic data interchange.

Towergate has begun to consolidate its underwriting systems, and is already seeing improvements. “If somebody is trying to buy home insurance and has claimed for a flood in the past, we are able to evaluate the severity of their claim and find the best product for their needs,” says Jon Mitchell, senior project manager at Towergate Underwriting. “The ability to validate business data in this way is critical in a successful underwriting operation because it generates good business.”

In addition, the company can bring products to market far more quickly and cost-effectively. “Building insurance products can be a complicated business, and the ability to do this ourselves quickly and with flexibility is enormously attractive,” says Mitchell.

Employees can access and manage information more easily and collaborate more efficiently because all agencies have consolidated their systems to create one standardised environment. Customer response times have also speeded up, as staff can generate results faster in-house and deal with incoming data faster. They find the system easy to use, and this minimises training costs.

This article first appeared in the 2008 edition of the Finance on Windows Partner Guide.

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