The growing demands of competition will pressure insurance companies to redefine their business models and provide higher levels of service and support. Insurers will seek new technology to help drive fundamental change and improve the ease of doing business. Service-oriented architectures, can speed transformation by driving new levels of agility into general insurance business. While service-oriented architectures sounds simple and straightforward in concept, implementing service-oriented architectures and realizing its primary business benefits can be complex and difficult in practice for most architects.

Service oriented architecture and business rule management systems have emerged as key enablers for improving core insurance solution processes. Service oriented architecture provides the foundation for sharing of business services across the enterprise and business rule management systems is used to automate and add decision-making capabilities to insurance processes across lines of business and channels. With service oriented architecture and business rule management systems, leading insurers can leverage existing IT investments while providing much-needed flexibility, transparency, and speed. In advanced insurance world, underwriting has used "Data-centric" tools, particularly Predictive Modeling, to enhance the rating process. Now, innovative claims organizations have seen the light as well. More and more companies are revolutionising their claims process through integrated analytics, data and other advanced technologies. What is the future of claims management? With cutting costs and increasing productivity more critical than ever, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) has become a growing trend that allows insurers to manage costs, improve cycle time, and renew focus on accurate appraisals including the use of alternative parts. Insurers must deal with multiple issues, including inflexible legacy systems; several applications in separate platforms and manual practices that lead to inconsistent enforcement of policy, claims and other guidelines. It all adds up to high operating costs and the inability to respond quickly to market and regulatory changes like phenomena of detariffing and market-wide pool formation in insurance etc.

Data mining and predictive analytic technology integrated with external information can provide significant Return on Investment by enhancing the claims workflow to improve company's claims outcomes. Growth and efficiency are key business drivers for all insurers. However, achieving these objectives is not easy.

Predictive modeling improves cycle time for common claim adjudication processes. Predictive Analytics is an integrated approach that includes other advanced "data-centric" tools, such as identity matching, link analysis and geo-mapping. Each of these applications can greatly expand company's ability to adjudicate, investigate and subrogate claims. Different data sources may be identified and harnessed for enhancing the performance of these tools.