Renewing the legacy

Insurance companies’ quest for mobility is often hampered by old mainframe technology saysJulian Dobbins, Senior Marketing Development Manager at Micro Focus, and while strategies have varied in the past, only now is the industry accepting that wide-scale replacement of these systems through rewriting presents an unacceptable level of risk with minimal return on investment. An Age of Pragmatism, it seems, has arrived, with business deliverables, rather than technology, foremost in people’s minds.

In his keynote speech at last year’s ACORD Forum in London, Nick Prettejohn, then chief executive of Lloyd’s, argued that poor quality data and business processes were threatening the very existence of the London insurance market. He went on to speak of the high operational costs that exist within the industry, and how this cost is not simply one of direct processing. “As a market,” he said, “we deal with some of the most volatile, dangerous and significant risks in the world. And yet, ironically, we compound that risk by handling it through a business process that breeds operational risk.”