Regulation raise IT hackles

The much feared UK emergency budget speech was made yesterday, and amongst a raft of changes impacting every corner of the British society was an increase in the tax on insurance purchases. The rate is to increase to 6%. A new peculiarity to this system is that tax on insurance sales will rise to 17.5% where the insurance is sold by seller of another product e.g. mechanical breakdown insurance (eg on domestic electrical appliances and secondhand cars), travel insurance, and insurance sold with TV and car hire. The challenge for the IT department is to respond in a timely fashion. Older legacy systems will have charges codified in several places and this reflecting this increase is not a simple matter. And once the change is made in the several systems and many places, there is the round of testing that is required. This whole cycle of change can be up to 9 months depending on current workload and dedicated IT test slots. In a conversation with a CIO on a different set of regulations, Solvency II, she raised the prospect of potentially having to replace incumbent legacy systems if they could not capture the additional data elements required in a reasonable cost. Adding new data elements to a core system, and having this reflecting in the appropriate screens is no trivial matter. And once again, requires serious investment of IT staff for testing for production. These real life use cases highlight the need to IT systems to be able to keep up with the change of the business, without a crippling cost. In choosing new systems, IT folk must focus as much on functionality as on the cost of ownership. As this week has shown once more, fleet of foot should be a key mantra in new system investment.