Leading insurance firm Hive has considerably improved its processes and reporting systems thanks to a new centralised IT system built by Spark Data Systems.

As one of the UK’s leading providers of Personal Medical Insurance (PMI), Hive holds information on more than 100,000 policies and around 2,000 sales advisors, past and present, and the volume of data that needs to be held is increasing every day.

“We built the original Policy Administration system to process policies and commissions for the company, and have supported them ever since,” explains Lee Fedder, director at Spark.

“We have worked hard to keep up with the challenging demands of an enterprising and forward looking client, where products and practices are continually changing. As part of our ongoing support, we regularly review the systems and look for improvements as the client business evolves. Recently we saw ways to improve how the advisor information was processed and reported.”

The way the systems had been set up meant that as the information had grown, it was being stored in different places - some advisor information was held in the core policy and commission systems, but some was also held for peripheral processes, such as recruitment, training, and compliance.

Spark presented a proposal to Hive to merge all this information in a central system covering all processes.

“Firstly we wanted to show April UK how merging all the systems into one make the whole system much quicker and easier to use. We then wanted to show how the merge could also help Hive with its compliance requirements.”

Spark designed the new system working alongside the Hive staff that use it and built an easy to use browser based application. One of the key reports that that can now be generated is an “Advisor Life Story”: a chronological description of everything that advisor has done with the company, from recruitment, through qualification, sales progress, promotions and exit.

This has become a requirement for Insurance companies in the UK, and whilst all the information was available before, it was distributed across a number of systems making it tricky to produce this type of report.

Thanks to the merge, all the advisor information is now in one place , which means there is much more consistency. Everything matches up and there is no need to enter details such as advisor name or date of birth more than once. If anyone updates advisor information, the change is seen by everyone else immediately, leading to much more comprehensive reports on advisors - something which is being scrutinized by auditing bodies such as the FSA.

Hive also now have a better platform for dealing with future requirements. With everything central, and using up to date technology, new functions and products can be added more easily.

With reasonable timescales and budgets, we have been able considerably to improve processes and reporting. Hive UK are very pleased with the results and the benefits it delivers.

To find out more contact Lee Fedder on 0117 9076563 or email lee@sparkdata.co.uk