Leading Chinese Insurer Taiping Life Chooses ILOG JRules for Its Underwriting System
SHANGHAI – Febuary 14, 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™, 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.”
About FirstTech
Founded in March 2003, FirstTech is a joint venture bringing together Baosight
Software and First Technologies (Cayman). FirstTech provides professional
consulting services and IT solutions to empower our customers’ business
operations. FirstTech’s competencies are in those aspects, including
Banking, Insurance, Semiconductor/LCD and Metal. FirstTech has partnered
with several world-wide leading companies such as ILOG, Prima Solution, SUN,
HP and Bea System. FirstTech has provided the state-of-art rule-based insurance
underwriting/claim/billing solution, supply chain management solution, and
Semiconductor TCTM (Total Cycle Time Management)Solution to industry-leading
customers including TaiPing Life, BAOSTEEL, NIPPON STEEL and HeJian Semiconductor.
For more information, please visit www.firsttech-soft.com.
About ILOG
ILOG delivers software and services that empower customers to make better decisions
faster and manage change and complexity. Over 2,500 global corporations and
more than 465 leading software vendors rely on ILOG's market-leading business
rule management system (BRMS), optimization and visualization software components,
to achieve dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products
and services, and sharpen their competitive edge. The BRMS market share leader,
ILOG was founded in 1987 and employs more than 700 people worldwide. For
more information, please visit www.ilog.com.
ILOG is a registered trademark, and ILOG JRules is a trademark, of ILOG. All
other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.
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