STRIDE committed to develop a switch to transfer data between all stakeholders

STRIDE committed to develop a switch to transfer data between all stakeholders in the South African short term insurance industry; this journey started in 2009 and development was completed in 2012. The initial intention of STRIDE was to reduce the cost of data management in the industry amongst all of the stakeholders. STRIDE enables the delivery of data in a standardised format across the industry, to reduce the data management costs. STRIDE transfers the data through a single data switch, which means that the variety of activity being channeled through the firewalls of participants will be reduced, and data encryption increases the data security considerably.

The Board and Shareholders of STRIDE decided to embark on the next leg of the STRIDE journey with a new value proposition built on the current solution and experience gained in the first phase. STRIDE Shareholders are committed to the new solution and are looking for a new business partner to help us achieve our business purpose. The aim is to build a portal, which will fast track the use of the switch and speed up use and development of the overall infrastructure.

In order to find the best partner to assist on this new and exciting journey, we are embarking on a formal Request for Proposal process kicking off today 19 May 2015 with the aim the get all responses in by 12 June 2015.

The successful proposal will deliver against two requirements. The first requirement is for a business partner/investor with the potential to obtain shareholding in the company. This requirement includes a financial investment and support.

The second requirement is a real time industry switch that has the ability to transact online via web-services to all participating insurers’ backend systems through a single STRIDE portal. STRIDE will take the responsibility to manage both ends of the relationship with insurers and third party systems providers to ensure that the distribution channels are armed with the required tools to ensure that policyholders receive efficient service delivery and fair treatment.

The portal will have access to the data requirements from the insurers and ensure that the third party system providers request the intermediary to populate the required fields before a quote or any other service request is replied to the insurer. All transactions will adhere to the SA ACORD AML standard.

Should your organisation be interested to participate in the RFP, please send your request, with a short overview of your company, to [email protected] and [email protected].