Interamerican has selected Clerity’s UniKix Mainframe Rehosting software and Veryant vCOBOL Enterprise to modernize its central insurance IT system.
The Greek insurer selected Clerity’s UniKix Batch Processing Environment (BPE) and Veryant’s vCOBOL software to move all legacy COBOL-based batch applications from IBM z/OS on the mainframe to Linux on IBM System z.
Interamerican is redeveloping its online IBM CICS workloads on the mainframe as Java Web-based applications, using UniKix to address batch/JCL requirements, and vCOBOL to support migrated COBOL programs in a similar way to the z/OS environment, until everything will be redeveloped in Java.
The company will be deploying UniKix BPE and vCOBOL on mainframe Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) processors in production, including more than two terabytes of sequential, VSAM and IBM DB2 data.
Interamerican CTO Nikos Katsaros said since the firm wanted to focus mostly on the redevelopment plans and the move to an open computing environment was for a platform that would help insurer achieve strategic goals with the least disruption of existing everyday processes.The project is expected to begin by end-February 2012.
Officials with the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCI) announced this week they intend to push for the overhaul of no-fault auto insurance systems in several states this year and to fight in others against proposed increases in labor rates for auto body repair.
The association, which includes more than 1,000 member companies nationwide, released a list of issues this week on which it plans to lobby state lawmakers, including no-fault changes, proposals that would allow the state to set hourly rates for auto body repair and mechanical work on insured vehicles, and restrictions on the use of consumer credit histories in determining premiums.
“PCI is committed to advancing a pro-consumer agenda that supports healthy, competitive insurance markets across the nation,” Paul Blume, senior vice president of state government relations for PCI, said in a news release.
PCI is one of many insurer organizations pushing for legislators to make changes to no-fault systems in a handful of states. Acc
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Ohio-based Great American Insurance has chosen Compliance Assurance Corporation’s (CAC) Comply On Demand Enterprise (CODE) to mitigate enterprise-wide regulatory risks. <
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As in other Republican-controlled states, Tennessees top officials are in a needless fret over whether to initiate planning for a state insurance exchange, the entities that states must have in place beginning in January 2014 to help uninsured citizens buy competitively priced, reasonably comprehensive health insurance.
Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey says he fears being seen as supporting Obamacare if he moves legislation to establish an exchange. Gov. Bill Haslam says he opposes the requirement for states to establish an exchange to promote transparent insurance competition. But he also fears losing millions in federal grants to help create an exchange, and possibly state control of the exchange, if the state doesnt move forward and defaults to a federally established exchange.
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New York-based professional services company, Towers Watson has introduced advanced versions of its RiskAgility MoSes enterprise financial modeling software and RiskAgility Economic Capital (EC) Aggregator software to help insurers efficiently manage risk and value.
The updated version 3.1 provides increased flexibility in scheduling and monitoring modelling runs and also expands detailed job status information and controls.Towers Watson’s global life software product manager Todd Erkis said the upgrades will enable customers to better run their MoSes models in RiskAgility production application environment, and the RiskAgility EC update will provide added options to project capital requirements forward.RiskAgility delivers a centralised, controlled environment for running financial models, including MoSes and RiskAgility EC applications.
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A new law signed by Governor Tom Corbett will give the Pennsylvania Insurance Department greater authority to review and disapprove rate increases in the small group market.
The signing of Act 133 is the first step toward restoring our rate authority and reclaiming control over the regulation of Pennsylvanias health insurance marketplace from the federal government, Insurance Commissioner Mike Consedine said. It also serves as a win for Pennsylvanias small businesses, which previously could not take advantage of regulatory protections and were subject to rate increases that were never filed with the department.
Previously, the departments review authority in the small group market was limited and only applied to a small portion of products.
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