Insurance industry leader finds solution in Genasys SKi®

Pictured right - from left to right: Steve Symes (CEO Genasys Technologies) and Ockie Oosthuizen (Chairman of Diagonal Insurance Solutions

Diagonal Insurance Solutions, one of the largest independent intermediaries in South Africa specialising in both broking and insurance administration, has implemented SKi® (pronounced sky), a management and customer information system specifically designed for the short term insurance industry by Genasys Technologies.

The result of combining best practice solutions developed for various clients in the financial services and insurance industries abroad, SKi® is a very flexible system, and one that is fast becoming the preferred solution for insurance businesses seeking to reduce operational costs and maintain service levels.

With its head office in Randburg and branches in Cape Town, Pretoria, Secunda and Durban, Diagonal has between 150 and 180 concurrent users on the system, comprising of its own staff and a number of brokers.

According to chairman, Mr. Ockie Oosthuizen, the IT challenges facing the company were slow development time and high costs, as well as time-consuming bordereaux reconciliation and reporting, and excessive month-end downtime.

"Our dated technology prevented us from moving forward with the rapid changes and demands within today's insurance industry and we found moving our business onto the Genasys system far easier than it had been going onto a new version of our old system,” he said.

“In addition, the support we were receiving was inadequate, and our old system did not hold the information to provide the necessary reports and was very rigid in terms of product development.

"After 25 years with our previous systems provider, we decided to change to SKi® and its unique design which specifically caters for the three aspects key to establishing a viable insurance business process outsource facility, namely business data migration, volume data management and business process automation.

‘We were also certainly attracted by one of SKi®’s primary benefits, that is the ability to encode an insurance company's own business rules into the system. This provides consistent quality of data and allows them the opportunity to let their brokers have access to their portfolios across the Internet.

“As Diagonal is a dynamic company, the flexibility of the system and the ease of adding new products was very important to us.”

Genasys Technologies CEO and founder, Steve Symes, explained that the project took 10 months from the first business requirements workshops to going live in June 2007.

"It was a bit like having to replace the engines on a Boeing while in flight, as Diagonal still had to run its business with all the challenges and changes, but in the end we converted 130 000 policies, clients and claims over a five-day period (three working days) and went live just after its month-end run,” he said.

"We ran the systems in parallel for a month before going live to ensure a smooth switch over. The majority of the go-live was done over a weekend and at month-end when Diagonal used to have down-time on the old system anyhow. In the end, there was not more than half a day of downtime, a substantial achievement by the team."

Diagonal now has greater access to its own information allowing them to examine its book and identify possible areas of concern or opportunities, combined with more control over its administration systems than ever before. Genasys has also provided a rating engine to allow them to target specific moral risk areas and price these appropriately and independently of its good risk profile.

"It is now possible to develop new products 'on the fly' with no programming changes and get them to the market very quickly," said Oosthuizen, "and integrated communication strategies built into SKi®, using Outlook Email and SMS have greatly enhanced the communication to our clients.

"Within the first three months of going live, Diagonal issued our bordereaux in record time. There was a major reduction in the time spent on accounting administration, and the turnaround time on all transactions was greatly reduced.

"The end result is that Diagonal now has a technologically sound, flexible and scalable system that can accommodate our future growth plans. Although we have ongoing support and assistance from Genasys, SKi® has enabled Diagonal to actively manage our risk profile and monitor underwriting measures without needing further assistance."

Added Symes: "SKi® is fully scalable, highly customisable and is ideal for brokers, broker networks, underwriting managers, administrators and insurance companies. Our product has been specifically designed to compliment, enhance and facilitate the business processes of the insurance industry thereby making your business run more smoothly."

Founded in 1997, Genasys Technologies is a fast-growing, technology-inspired software company which develops and supports world-class software and services for its partners in the insurance industry.