Axe falls on insurance firms

Sydney integrator Axe Group has partnered IBM Global Services to deliver a multi-million dollar electronic hub for a consortium of seven insurance organisations - Allianz, NRMA, MTQ, GE Insurance, CGU, QBE Mercantile Mutual and the Insurance Council of Australia.

Kimberley Lathe, CEO of Axe, said the project was the first such Australian collaboration of competing insurance companies to produce the e-hub. Further, the project would enable Axe to hone and polish its skills before a wider audience.

'It's dealing with six different companies and the Insurance Council of Australia that formed the consortium and having to work in what you can appreciate is a very collaborative effort,' she said. 'I'm hoping there will be a number of successes flowing from this.'

Axe and IBM were briefed to complete the project by March 2004, when new compliance and company disclosure rules, under the Financial Services Reform Act, would take effect, the companies said in a statement.

Some 10,000 end-users would be represented by the consortium -- but many more could be included as the hub ramped up, she said.

Lathe said Axe had done 'quite a few' such complex projects before and had also built its own business automation platform. However, this deal was unique, she said, in having competitors collaborate build a hub together that would satisfy so many compliance needs and costs.

'I know that [Allianz group Financial Services Reform project manager] Matthew Chee has estimated that this will reduce their administrative processing costs by 50 percent,' she said.

For example, the hub would allow insurance companies to submit their Financial Services Guide forms electronically to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Lathe said.

The integrator was originally employed to design the project. Then, when the project was put out to tender in late 2003, Axe and IBM partnered to win the deal. The e-hub was scheduled to go live late January, she said.

'It's in the final stages. It's been a very tight time-frame,' she said.

Privacy and security had been big issues in the hub deployment, which would use IBM's Tivoli Access Manager software, for example, to ensure users could only see the data stored which pertained to their own clients.

Janet Matton, director of e-business on demand for IBM Global Services in Australia, said an 'on demand' model for services provided via the hub would be adopted.
 
'The Linux environment is able to be shared by multiple customers and multiple business partners. That is part of the automation, so customers can buy into the availability of that environment according to their needs,' Matton said.

Customers then wouldn't need to spend on setting up and running all the hardware, software, associated infrastructure and services themselves, instead paying a fee for as much or as little as they needed at a time, she said.

'This is a version of capacity on demand -- one flavour of IBM's on-demand message -- to provide a completely managed computing environment, 24x7, which for many customers is very complex if they have to build it themselves,' she said.

Skills and capabilities associated with complex IT infrastructures could thus be made affordable for smaller companies, Matton suggested.