Outsurance, South Africa`s newest and fastest-growing short term insurance company, has developed a unique computing system to drive its new business and help it achieve its goal of changing the image of the South African insurance industry.
The Rand Merchant Bank Holdings subsidiary started trading in March this year with the sole objective of being "different in a market characterised by mediocre service". To do so, it has adopted a high service/direct selling model heavily dependent on a computer-based automated call center system and supported by integrated computing systems.
To ensure these systems are able to meet its business goals, the company opted to design and develop its own insurance business applications using the UniVerse relational database and System Builder development tools from Ardent Software South Africa.
"We wanted to do things differently," says Howard Aron, who, with two other short term insurance specialists, Rene Otto and Willem Roos were responsible for conceptualizing the new business which includes returning 10% of premiums paid to customers who do not make claims.
"We decided to build our own short term insurance business system rather than buy in a solution. We wanted to build a system with what I call `an insurance 4GL`. So, using UniVerse and SB+, we compiled a series of tools that allow our business analysts to build an insurance system quickly and easily to match our specific needs.
"This gives us extreme flexibility and enables us to be responsive to change and allows us to be very innovative," he says.
Aron together with two other developers began work on the system in May 1997. Beta testing started in December and the system was ready to go live in March when the company opened its doors.
The company considered a mainframe-based solution, but, according to Aron, the UniVerse route, with systems running on a Data General 5900, Unix-based server and Windows NT workstation-based clients enabled them "to do a lot more for a lot less, and a lot faster".
"But even if it took three years to build the system, I would make the same decision. There is no doubt about it," he says, adding that he is confident that the system can more than handle projected growth well into the next decade. The system currently has over a 100 users and another 150 will go line in the next 18 months.
"If a data base is designed properly, the only thing that is going to restrict your growth, is disk space. UniVerse will never restrict us, even with our aggressive 5-year growth plan," he says.
"The nice thing about UniVerse and is multivalues is that it lets you handle huge amounts of data and allows you to build a database logically."
The system was designed with what Aron terms is a "Black Box" approach meaning the software is designed is such a way that you don`t need an IT department to run it.
Another advantage of UniVerse is that it runs on both Microsoft NT and Unix. Aron says that NT should be an option in the future and with the combination of the DG which is Intel based and UniVerse he will be able to port the entire Outsurance Software solution to NT with and major software changes.
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