OneShield Client Conference 2014 Wraps Up with Major Acquisition and New Product Announcements

Insurance carrier clients and OneShield market partners pack two-day event to hear industry thought leaders identify latest core systems trends, best practices and fads.

MARLBOROUGH, MA, June 3, 2014 /CNW/ - Over 100 attendees from the global insurance industry gathered in St. Petersburg, FL May 19-20, 2014 for the annual client conference of OneShield, Inc., a leading core systems software provider for the insurance sector.

New Claims Product Announced
OneShield revealed it will be releasing an enterprise-level software solution for the lifecycle management of insurance claims. OneShield Claims® is currently in rapid development and is expected to be available to the marketplace by the first quarter of 2015.

This new product completes the enterprise suite of OneShield Insurance software products, and will leverage OneShield's open architecture and "Power of One" philosophy — that is, using the same data model, architecture, partner management and master database as other products, such as OneShield Policy and OneShield Billing.

Minneapolis-based MMIC Group (MMIC), the largest policyholder-owned professional medical liability insurance company in the U.S. Midwest, has already signed on with OneShield as an early adopter of OneShield Claims. MMIC will be collaborating with OneShield's software development team to identify features and enhancements.

Major Acquisition Announced
Glenn Anschutz, OneShield's President and Chief Executive Officer, also announced an agreement to acquire key strategic and intellectual property assets of Danbury, CT-based Clear Data Strategies, LLC (CDS). CDS provides subscription cloud-based and site-installed software solutions for claims processing and policy administration for the property and casualty (P&C) insurance market. Customers include mid-sized and niche P&C carriers, self-insured organizations, specialty workers compensation insurance providers requiring full NCCI compliance, and TPAs and MGAs.

OneShield is absorbing the CDS product line, and will also leverage CDS' 25 years of expertise in claims processing, and use it to further enhance the capabilities and functionality of its own claims administration product offering currently in development.

"This acquisition will expand our opportunities into lower-tier carriers, as well as specialty niche markets, where hosted and cloud-based solutions are increasingly popular," says Anschutz.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Initiative Launched with Ward Group
OneShield will be partnering with Cincinnati-based Ward Group to gather and analyze data on the true ongoing costs of maintaining a modern policy administration system (PAS). Ward Group is the leading provider of benchmarking and best practices studies for insurance companies.

The TCO analysis will focus on PAS costs in regard to self-sufficiency capabilities, business agility, maintainability and the cost-benefit of upgrades. Once completed, the study will be released in the near future as a whitepaper for industry review.

OneShield Client Awards
Seven insurance carriers were honored at the conference for achieving milestones in production as OneShield clients. Partnership Awards were presented to:

• Allied World Assurance Company (10 years in production)
• The Hanover Insurance Group (8 years in production)
• PURE Insurance (7 years in production)
• Selective Insurance (7 years in production)
• Capitol Insurance Companies (7 years in production)
• The Main Street America Group (6 years in production)
• North Light Specialty (5 years in production)

OneShield Product Roadmap News
The conference included roundtable discussions of best practices, hands-on sessions with OneShield technology experts, and information sessions about the OneShield product roadmap.

Among the session topics were:

• Introduction of the new OneShield user interface (UI)
• Unveiling of OneShield's new Billing product, which was designed from the
  ground-up
• Updates on the newest version of OneShield Designer, which allows business and technical users to modify almost any process, workflow or UI within the OneShield Insurance Software suite
• Blending the Agile and Waterfall approaches to project management and software development
• Best practices for on-going system maintenance, including infrastructure and security management

Core Systems Software Trends Identified
The two-day conference offered invaluable content for users on both the business and technical side of the insurance sector. Industry keynote speakers included Chad Hersh, Managing Director of Novarica, who discussed "Trends and Fads in Insurance, an Analyst Perspective."

Author of numerous market-leading reports on insurance core systems, Hersh suggested insurers need take a more strategic approach to trends, such as the use of mobile technology by insurance clients to interact with companies. Given the rate of change in tablet adoptions, he said, insurers cannot afford to be left behind, adding that avoiding mobile strategies is like avoiding web browsers in the late 1990s.

Overall, Hersh commented: "With old and new clients in attendance, the well-attended OneShield client conference served as a fitting backdrop for the announcement of the Clear Data Strategies acquisition, which should bolster OneShield in a number of areas such as claims, cloud, and the smaller end of the market."

"The excitement around the growth of the client base, acquisition and their development of claims and roadmap items was obvious," he added, "and the event served as a great forum for clients to compare notes."

OneShield Insurance Software is a configurable end-to-end software platform that automates and simplifies the complexities of every stage of the insurance policy lifecycle. With client self-sufficiency and lower total cost of ownership among its chief goals, OneShield's built-in tools allow business and technical team members to work together, while empowering them to easily reconfigure product offerings, the user interface, workflows, rates, rules, forms, and transaction processing methods as needed — all without writing a line of code or hiring outside help.

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About OneShield Inc.
OneShield, Inc. delivers core business software solutions to the global P&C and General Insurance industry. Our portfolio of products includes enterprise-class policy management, billing, rating, product configuration, and reporting and analytic solutions that leverage a tool-based open architecture and single data model platform to streamline your business. OneShield Insurance Software automates and simplifies the complexities of core systems with targeted solutions, seamless upgrades and collaborative implementations.

With its corporate headquarters in Marlborough, MA and offices in Australia, Canada and India, OneShield, Inc. has a combined 44 products in production across all commercial, personal and specialty lines of business. To learn more, visit oneshield.com.

SOURCE OneShield