MindTree partners with LANSA to offer e-commerce products

Sufia Tippu
Sunday, 09 July 2006 15:31

IT Industry - Market

Bangalore-based MindTree Consulting has partnered with Australian-based software firm, LANSA to offer web-enabled insurance products for the first time in India.

Mindtree is an IT and R&D services firm started by a group of veterans from Wipro about six years ago.

Just a month ago, it opened an office in Sydney aiming at increasing its footprint in Australia.

Apart from increasing its presence in Australia, the partnership with LANSA is aimed at enabling MindTree to become the sole Indian implementer of InsureIT, an interactive Internet transaction processing framework for insurance companies.

Today, the insurance industry faces multiple challenges in the application and quotation processes due to the absence of an integrated management framework. A large proportion of Web-based quotation implementations are stand-alone, requiring re-keying of quotes generated from an independently maintained rating engine. This leads to duplicate data entry, resulting in delays. Another issue that has been plaguing this industry is that they are unable to simultaneously to both consumers or to indirect business from brokers and agents.

With the InsureIT framework, Indian insurance companies and brokers aim to build web-enabled insurance products which would allow insurers to connect with both customers and also offer special facilities for call center, staff and management access. The goal is to develop an interactive web presence which links in real time to their back-office policy administration system. A sophisticated rating engine is also provided, together with the option to link to external rating engines if required.

MindTree senior vice president, Rajan Narayanan, said, “Most insurance companies in India are using legacy systems for their back-end operations. Now, we will be able to offer Indian insurance sector an e-commerce framework for insurance products that is robust, efficient, easy to maintain, and more future proof than any other solution available today. More important, these insurance products can be built exceptionally quickly and maintained easily by non-technical users.”

The company has been building and adapting mission critical applications using the LANSA family of products and tools and has already built web-based solutions using LANSA for a US-based insurance company.