Systems/Enterprise:

FRENCH INSURER SELECTS PRIMA TO IMPLEMENT SOA VISION

Prima Solutions, provider of Prima Platform, the Foundation for Service Oriented Insurance Applications, announced that France's largest life and health insurer, CNP Assurances, has chosen its flagship software, Prima Platform, and started to implement two new service oriented insurance applications leveraging its IT legacy assets.

With Prima Platform, CNP Assurances will increase its ability to adapt to changes in the marketplace and reduce the costs and complexity of maintaining its back- to front-office infrastructure. Prima Platform will support the gradual delivery of new insurance front-end applications to support the complex requirements of CNP Assurances business users in the areas of distribution, policy and claims administration while providing more agility in the management of CNP Assurances' legacy systems' transformation.

By implementing a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to integrate and streamline its core insurance processes, CNP Assurances will bring new complex applications to market much faster, and hence be more responsive to the needs of its internal users and external business partners.

"CNP Assurances is in a unique position in the market place: the volumes of transactions that CNP Assurances handles for its distribution networks contribute to its status as a leading industrial player of life and health insurance. This positioning creates very complex IT requirements. This is the case at the back-end level, where we need systems to manage a very diverse range of products over a long period of time. This is also true at the front-end level, where we need to efficiently serve the needs of the 14 million clients of our distribution partners for individual and group products as well as those of our staff supporting policy and claims administration," said Jean-Pierre Walbaum, a member of the management board of CNP Assurances. "In order to increase our overall adaptability and become even more efficient in serving business users, we needed a better way to develop new front-end applications. With Prima Platform, we will be able to consistently build service oriented insurance applications and thus rapidly improve our adaptability, responsiveness and efficiency."

"Reducing the cost and time required to deliver new insurance applications implies leveraging existing legacy applications, favouring the re-use of components and services and reducing complexity by enforcing a structured approach based on standards in our various projects," stated Phat Chua Lim, CIO of CNP Assurances. "At CNP Assurances, we have adopted these fundamental principles of a Service Oriented Architecture to drive the development of our new front-end applications. With Prima Platform we have acquired a strong standards-based software foundation which delivers all the key insurance and technical assets required to support service oriented insurance applications. Two projects are already underway using Prima Platform."

"In order to better align IT with business objectives it is our belief at Prima Solutions that all major insurers will gradually adjust their IT infrastructure to meet with the principles of SOA. The benefits, both business and IT, obtained by our existing clients are immense. The questions for most companies should therefore no longer be 'why?', but 'when?' and 'how?' explained Stephane Guinet, CEO of Prima Solutions.

"Since 1999, our mission at Prima Solutions is to help insurance organizations forge their path to SOA. By selecting Prima Platform, CNP Assurances is confirming its value as the reference software platform for SOA implementation in insurance and leading the way in the adoption of SOA among its worldwide insurance market leader peers."