Enhanced IDS solution from TransUnion offers advanced insight to the insurance industry

TransUnion, a leading South African credit and information management provider, has launched an enhanced version of its industry-leading Insurance Data System (IDS).

IDS, developed under the auspices of the South African Insurance Association (SAIA), is a comprehensive database of all personal lines claims and policy information collated by participating members of the short-term insurance industry. The latest version of IDS offers a number of major benefits, including greater breadth and depth of data, faster time to insight and improved agility. Several enhanced solutions are also available on the platform to deliver added value to the insurance industry.

“The basis of the enhancements to IDS lies in our migration from a legacy mainframe to Ab Initio, an architecture developed specifically to handle high-volume data processing applications and enterprise application integration. This has improved the sorting and collection of data, allowing us to focus strongly on data quality while simultaneously enabling increased data processing volume,” says Ian Logan, Senior Director Business Development: Insurance and Partners at TransUnion.

“This migration came as a direct result of feedback from our customers. By rolling out our enhanced IDS solution we are able to cater not only to the requirement for more reliable insight from accurate data, but also the need to handle and process greater volumes of data than ever before, in near-real time, to effectively address and mitigate a variety of risk,” he adds.

IDS enables participating insurance organisations to access an integrated view of policy applications and claims prior to taking on further risk. The system holds information on over 9 million claim records and over 3 million policies.

In order to ensure data security access is limited to a closed user group and provided exclusively to participants that share policyholder information around both claims and policies.

The new system offers a number of major benefits, including:

• Easier loading and validation of data;

• Increase in ability to house policy and claims data;

• Wider and easier-to-use search criteria;

• Enhanced matching of claims and policy data;

• A seven year view of claims;

• Ability to customise reports for client use; and

• A more accurate view of dates submitted and loaded.

In addition to an improved offering, the enhanced IDS platform now also offers insurers access to a number of value-added solutions. Claims Enabler is a one-stop solution for the insurance industry which drives faster, more efficient claims processing. Quick Quote offers a number of credit data models to help short term insurers reduce risk by effectively predicting the loss ratio and potential lapse rate of an applicant through a single, seamless process. eNaTIS integration enables insurers to check and verify drivers licenses, as well as access to Auto Information Solutions (AIS) information, to verify the registered status of vehicles, vehicle valuation and more. These solutions combine to offer the insurance industry more insight than ever before faster and more intuitively, for improved decision-making ability and reduced risk.

“TransUnion is the only risk information company in South Africa to hold multiple, complex databases of relevant and current information on consumers, businesses and assets. This puts us in a unique position to become a leading risk information solution provider. The release of our enhanced IDS on the Ab Initio platform is the first step in this journey,” Logan concludes.