Demands made on a point-of-sale solution for insurance companies

In the business with supplementary insurance policies such as residual debt insurance or travel insurance policies, retail oriented sales approaches enable new market segments to be opened up and developed. By tapping the branch network of a sales partner, insurance companies are able to expand their own sales organizations.

In addition to in-depth, specialist knowledge of the product, the conception of a technical solution for these sales sequences, also at the point of sale, calls for know-how concerning the marketing relevant processes as well as the added value generated by the respective sales partner. Moreover, sales oriented users make stringent demands on the benchmarks of online service quality (such as operability, ergonomics etc.). This calls for a direct orientation of system operation with the applications that are already in use, for example. All in all, the cooperation between OEV and mgm technology partners meets the following requirements:

• Online handling of transactional business processes such as new business (generation of the insurance policy), cancellations and notifications of damage.
• Integration into the existing processes, and / or into the sales partner’s system landscape.
• Transfer of newly acquired accounts to the basic systems of the insurance company.
• Automated distribution of commission between the sales partners.
• Support of follow-up activities by the in-house service staff of the respective insurance companies.
• Scalability with regard to the high number of users.
• Implementation of legal requirements as in connection with the reform of the Insurance Act (VVG) and the compliance with data protection regulations.

Dynamic further development of sales channel after initial introduction

“Experience shows that active online sales channel management is one of the key success factors for long term positive business development”, as Thomas Baumbach, managing director of OEV emphasized. Key demands in this context are, for example, the realization of product innovations, as well as the integration of additional sales partners. In most instances, product portfolio expansions must be implemented in a short period of time. The introduction of a new insurance product such as an account protection policy, for example, calls for expansions of the entire business logic: the calculation foundation, the algorithms used to calculate premiums as well as the contract documents must be adapted accordingly. “In order to ensure the smooth functioning of downstream processes, such as the transfer to the insurance company’s inventory systems and the automated distribution of commis-sion payments, the cooperation with software engineers must also function without glitches. And that will only be the case if all of the participants have a sound grasp of the essential contents,” explains Christian Hoyer, technical project manager at OEV.

In the integration of new partners, the solution must be attuned to the professional and technical requirements of the respective new partner. In the final instance, the considerable expansion of the number of users plays a key role here.

Economic efficiency in operations and further development within the overall system

In order to enhance the economic efficiency in operations, OEV and mgm have placed a strong emphasis on Open Source technologies that have already proven their worth in upward scaling projects with a large number of users, high data volume as well as with regard to integration capabilities.

The criteria for utilization of an Open Source technology are oriented to economic efficiency in the operation phase, as especially in day-to-day business a high number of demands and requests ensue from the sales channel.

With regard to the development environment and the project infrastructure industrial principles for the technical delivery phase must be considered that are similar to the production line in automobile manufacturing (such as build & deployment, regression and performance tests, delivery etc.). “We succeeded in realizing the recently concluded integration of a new sales partner with 500 new users within a period of six weeks,” adds Christian Hoyer.

* This reference has been officially confirmed by OEV Online Dienste GmbH.