AlfaStrakhovanie Group, one of the largest Russian insurers, is among the first companies in Russia to implement a business rule management system via IBM WebSphere ILOG BRMS. The new system can process up to 10,000 vehicle insurance rate calculations and commission fees per minute. The project was implemented jointly with CROC.

Insurance companies use about 2,000 different business rules for numerous purposes, from insurance rate calculation to client rating and data checks, etc. Data management in such large volumes requires much time and hampers business development. As a result, more and more large insurance companies use Business Rule Management System (BRMS) platforms. AlfaStrakhovanie decided to implement a unified business rule management platform to calculate vehicle insurance (KASKO, OSAGO and Green Card policies) rates and agent commission fees.

“Our key objectives are to increase efficiency, remove business growth roadblocks, support new market penetration and improve the quality of customer service. In the past, changes in rate calculation rules took several weeks and required IT team involvement,” says Andrey Pedorenko, Director of Information Technology Department, OAO AlfaStrakhovanie. “The new systems helped to considerably accelerate the time to market of new rates and special offers. This is important, as a quick response to market changes is one of our key competitive advantages. This project takes us closer to the dream of every salesperson: individual rates for each client.”

“Today, all insurance companies, especially large-scale ones, offer a variety of plans for any scenario. While this is very convenient for consumers, it is a headache for insurers. Using a traditional approach, it is impossible to quickly and flexibly change multiple rate parameters. However, now business users can change calculation rules on their own, with their IT department simply having to support system operation. More than 200 input parameters and thousands of atomic rules are used for calculations and the system offers an extremely high level of performance,” says Ivan Rubtzov, Deputy Director General for Key Accounts, CROC.

“The IBM ILOG BRMS system is now part of the WebSphere Operation Decision Management solution. Therefore, BRMS standard functionality is enhanced with additional business event identification capabilities. The solution analyses events within information systems and notifies users of significant business events. For example, it analyses client calls via multiple channels and generates a ‘prepare proposal’ response. The BRMS module of the platform is already responsible for the preparation of customized proposals,” says Eduard Dolgalev, WebSphere Team Leader, IBM Russia and CIS. “We believe that this platform has enormous potential: it is an operational decision-making center for business units in companies which have an individual approach to clients”.

In the near future, AlfaStrakhovanie plans to calculate rates for other insurance products.