"While it is imperative to have solid underwriting and offer relevant products at competitive prices, companies know it is absolutely critical to implement business processes that make it easier for their distribution partners to do business with them, rather than their competitors."

Revenue growth and reduced unit cost can be gained through the use of a fully integrated electronic new business application tool; leading to:

• Faster producer application completion
• An efficient and easy means of submitting new business
• Increase in "good order" applications
• Elimination of redundant data entry
• Reduced cycle-time

"As many companies have discovered, putting up a Web page is easy, but tying new software into mainframes coded in outdated programming languages is hard".

Electronic application solutions range from fillable forms to completely integrated "straight-through-processing".

Data Exchange and Integration Middleware
As businesses have grown complex, the need for integrating heterogeneous enterprise applications to achieve a unified business process is a priority. In the insurance arena, these business processes may be restricted to an enterprise or span across multiple companies. This demands the development of a middleware framework that shares existing business processes and data across applications internal and external to the enterprise.

Insurance organizations today are looking to harness the power of Internet to reach new markets, lower transaction costs, open distribution channels, reduce issuance cycle time, offer additional conveniences and make it easier to do business with. Integrating their internal systems is paramount to facilitate further integration with suppliers and partners, among others. Paragon offers a unique middleware integration framework that can be easily customized to work with the enterprise integration strategy. It follows a process-model based approach where the strategic business functions are exposed as re-usable services. The framework is best suited in Enterprise Application Integration paradigms where multiple integration approaches such as message-oriented, database-oriented and file-based data transfer mechanisms are required.

The framework addresses key architecture requirements such as flexibility, scalability, availability, robustness and security in its architecture. Industry standard transformation engines such as ACORD XMLife and NAILBA, enables proprietary applications to provide data in industry standard formats thus interacting directly with external partners as an extended enterprise.

Paragon's well constructed hierarchy management solution provides:

• Integrated view of "business related" hierarchies in a single infrastructure
• Allow authorization maintenance across multiple applications versus an individual application level
• Ease integration with enterprise standard security engines - Single Sign-on infrastructures
• Optimize data segmentation and analysis across several dynamic organizational hierarchies
• Rapid assimilation of new and/or changes in relationships (i.e. merger/acquisition, migration between producer groups)