Atlanta, GA � July 14, 2003 – DWL, the leader in enterprise business services software, today announced it plans to deliver comprehensive customer management and self-service transactions for the insurance industry through tight integration with IBM WebSphere Portal Server to help create a customer focused on demand workplace.
DWL Insurance and DWL Customer solutions align insurers core business and channel systems, delivering real-time customer knowledge and transactional business functions such as customer portfolio and household information, policy and billing inquiry, fund management and claims status.
“Insurers have seen the value of opening their back-end systems to agents and brokers over the Web,” says Matthew Josefowicz, manager of the Insurance group at Celent, an IT strategy research firm. “Now with enterprise portals, they are providing the same kind of functionality and ease of use to internal staff in order to improve service and increase access to information.”
WebSphere Portal enables customers to realize greater value by combining DWL Customer and Insurance business functions with other IBM and third party software solutions. For example, DWL Customer and Insurance transactions such as name and address and policy inquiry and claims business functions can be extended with IBM DB2 Content Manager and IBM WebSphere Business Integration software to create a complete, end-to-end claims processing system.
“The immediate benefit for insurers with this unique DWL offering is their ability to make specific customer and transactional business functions available for use by customers or employees. They can modify and adapt existing business processes, as changing market conditions require. Insurers can also develop and offer new services to attract more customers, said Bruce McPherson, vice president, product marketing, DWL.
William N. Pieroni, general manager, IBM Global Insurance Industry, adds: “This is another example of WebSpheres increasing penetration in the insurance application space. DWLs adoption of WebSphere Portal means insurers benefit from the lower costs and risks, plus faster integration and adoption of their applications. In turn, policy holders or potential new customers benefit because they can conduct more real-time self-service insurance transactions, make inquiries, request and get quotes and conduct other insurance activities in a convenient, fast and easy manner.
Specific business transactions that will be made available through the DWL Insurance solution include quotes, fund management, policy and billing inquiry, claims inquiry and status, billing and claims history, customer portfolio, forms, enrolment, and sales and marketing materials. Insurers can also build new transactional business functions using DWL Unifi.
DWL Insurance solutions are built using DWL Unifi, a Java-based framework that provides a consistent architecture and design for developing real time transactional business functions. The architecture consists of the key components and services for creating web-based self-service transactions for the IBM WebSphere Portal Server environment. The DWL Insurance solution architecture is designed to leverage industry standard messages like ACORD and technical standards like J2EE, XML and XSL.
DWL Customer”, an enterprise customer hub for real time customer management, is an enterprise customer hub that unifies customer data and transactions from product silos and delivers this knowledge to all channels. It is based on a ‘services-oriented architecture’ and built on J2EE standards, making it the most scalable and market-proven application for customer management. Additionally, DWL Customer can allow organizations to derive additional ROI from current CRM implementations and even failed CRM projects that lacked sufficient customer data management foundations or a customer hub during the time of implementation.
About IBM WebSphere Portal
IBM WebSphere Portal, recently named the #1 in the business portal infrastructure market share category by Gartner Dataquest, is gaining significant adoption by leading Financial Services Software Vendors like DWL, as a means to deliver their Industry application functionality. WebSphere Portal provides a unified browser environment to deliver integrated role-based and on demand workplaces for financial services knowledge workers of all types on multiple and traditional pervasive devices. This capability coupled with the business solutions offered by vendors like DWL, form powerful business solutions within the Insurance and Banking industries of the Financial Sector.
About DWL Inc.
DWL is the leader in Enterprise Business Services software. DWL applications elevate customer, account and product functions from front and back office silos to an enterprise-wide service layer. This enables companies to unify, view and update customer information across all business lines and systems in real time and give their consumers, partners, suppliers and employees a single view of the enterprise. The result is consistent and real time delivery of products and services, strengthened relationships with key business audiences and increased return on companiesback office, front office and CRM systems.
Founded in 1996, DWL is headquartered in Atlanta and has offices in New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, London, S�o Paulo and Tokyo. DWL clients include MetLife, Citi Cards, Atlantic Blue Cross Care, Empire Financial, CGU, and Royal & SunAlliance, among others. DWL has strategic relationships with BEA Systems, IBM and Sun Microsystems. Key system integrator alliances include Accenture and IBM Global Services. DWL is a registered trademark of DWL Inc.
