Background
Now part of Royal Bank of Scotland Insurance, Churchill Insurance is one of the UK’s top 5 insurers. The company was formed in June 1989 with 88 employees selling car insurance policies, and added home insurance products the following year. Today, Churchill insures more than 7 million cars and homes, with a customer base of almost 3 million. The company employs over 7,000 people. Exceptional service underpins Churchill’s growth. Indeed, the company's vision is to deliver the best customer service in the insurance industry world-wide. A third of new business comes from recommendations and 85% of existing business is renewed. Customers send in 150,000 comment forms a year without any incentive to do so - and over 99% of those customers are highly satisfied.
The company has an impressive record of innovation. It was the first to include Unique Guaranteed Service Standards, it introduced wholly owned garages to ensure the highest standards of repair work, and provides courtesy cars for customers when their own are off the road, it was also the first to introduce a customer loyalty programme, and much more. Churchill is considered to have some of the best software in the industry, capable of handling 18 million transactions a day.
Business Requirement
In the insurance market today, customers and prospective clients want information instantly either delivered by a call centre or via the Web. The days when an insurance quotation would take days to process are long gone. To provide the best possible service and gain maximum business advantage, Churchill decided that the decision support information provided by Experian would need to be integrated in real-time with the existing underwriting and claims applications. Experian is the World’s leading provider of decision-making information that helps reduce fraud and mitigate risk.
A middleware solution was sought that would enable the in-house Oracle based applications to seamlessly integrate with the Experian IBM CICS environment.
The Solution
Churchill Insurance engaged Modcomp to provide the solution. Modcomp’s proposed solution was considered to be both cost effective and efficient. Churchill needed software capable of sustaining high transaction loads, and as the components delivered by Modcomp would be a mission critical, they needed to be robust and capable of reliable 24x7 operation. Modcomp met Churchill’s expectation and the software went live within 4 months of the project starting.
ViewMax
The solution built by Modcomp was based around our ViewMax Screen Scraping technology. ViewMax is a synchronous middleware integration platform. With a range of adaptors, and a rapid application development environment, ViewMax allows Modcomp to rapidly build connectivity solutions. In the case of Churchill Insurance, we used the Experian LU 6.2 adaptor and the Oracle adaptor.
Modcomp specialise in integration middleware and transactional web application development with a professional services organisation that is able to offer a full range of consulting, development and support services.