SID

SID is a comprehensive, fully integrated general insurance platform. The system supports all core business functions, with highly configurable product definition and business process engines, making it an effective solution for all product lines and underwriting models, from specialist coverholders and local retail insurers to global commercial carriers.

Comprehensive functionality, supporting all underwriting models

SID features extensive functionality covering all core areas of general insurance operations. Starting with the submission stage, any underwriting opportunity can be registered, quoted and bound in SID. At different stages of the process key underwriting information will be recorded and the underwriter will be assisted with various workflow tools, to ensure a smooth, efficient and complete underwriting process. Alternatively, covers may be pre-rated using SID’s rating engine, and the policy bind process externalized to intermediaries via SID’s web, API or even mobile, interfaces.

SID also handles the entire policy lifecycle process. New business, mid-term adjustments, renewals (including tacit) and cancellations are all supported by SID and the relative documentation can be issued from the system. Likewise, claims handling is fully supported by SID, including loss notifications, new claims, reserve movements, finalizations, claims diary and document production.

Invoices, debit notes, account statements and various other accounting documents can also be produced by SID and are part of a massive finance functionality, which includes billing, premium chasing, payments, cash allocations and even general ledger and accounting.

SID literally supports any underwriting model – business can be written direct, on reinsurance or coinsurance basis, subscribed under a binder, in any currency, in any language, through multiple levels of intermediaries.

Generic product definition model, enabling detailed risk data capture and profound business intelligence

SID provides generic lists of insurable objects and risks, which may be combined in unlimited ways to build insurance products. Together with the numerous other configurable product attributes, this makes SID a powerful tool to launch pretty much any product out-of-the-box, without the need for coding. Another key benefit of this generic cover matrix model is that it enables business analysis and reporting across many dimensions of the portfolio, such as class of business, distribution channel, client, etc. and down to a very granular level, e.g. profitability of fire cover for property in a certain geographic location for a certain broker. In addition, risk data is captured by SID in the form of policy and claim transactions, which all have dates of introduction into the system and effective dates for the events they represent. For analytical purposes, this practically allows “time travel” through the development of the portfolio.

Highly configurable processes, providing flexibility across operations and markets

All business processes in SID are presented to the user in the form of activities, which are configurable from individual steps. This “activity based” approach, on one hand makes SID a very user-friendly system because the user is guided through the process, and on the other ensures data integrity as the system performs the necessary validations at each individual step, and before the entire activity is processed. In addition, users are provided access to activities according to their user profiles, ensuring proper controls are in place and detailed logs exist for all user actions. This high level of configurability of business processes, coupled with other numerous configurable parameters, such as language, taxes, printouts, etc., is what makes it possible for SID to be a common platform for a carrier in different markets and has enabled quick and cost-effective new market entry for our clients.

Advanced, adaptive technology

SID is built on the .NET platform using the C# language. The architectural and design choices ZOV has made throughout the years were shaped by the real-life experience, gained from operating in markets of varying scale and complexity, as well as constant adoption of the latest technology trends and best practices. Today, SID is a mature, time-tested yet modern enterprise insurance system. Some of the distinguishing features of SID from technology and architectural standpoint are:

• Ability to scale horizontally on commodity hardware to clusters containing hundreds of nodes;

• Ability to run in wide range of environments, on-premise or in the cloud;

• Ability to integrate with up- and downstream applications in heterogeneous environments using APIs;

• Ability to quickly follow technology changes and adopt new technologies providing its users with latest technology advances;

Horizontal Scalability on Commodity Hardware and Software

Unlike many enterprise systems, that require expensive hardware or software, or need setting up complex topologies and infrastructures, SID embraces flexibility, scalability and simplicity of deployment and operations.

Not only does SID run on commodity hardware, not only does it support horizontal scalability at all tiers, but it also allows partitioning the server cluster depending on business needs and then scaling these partitions independently from one another. The implications of this are profound:

• Reduced cost - The system can be installed on an off-the-shelf infrastructure that can be chosen to fully match the particular business needs and there is no need to buy (or rent), license and provision expensive hardware and software.

• Cost-effective scaling to handle large traffic, bursts of load, etc.

• Resilience and fail-over capabilities - SID doesn't have a single point of failure. When a worker node fails, the other node takes its load. The system is even smart enough to work around load balancer failures and the nodes would still continue working, and even continue to balance the traffic load among them.

Adding to the operations flexibility and efficiency is the fact that SID doesn't have any special dependencies on external software packages, proprietary or open source.

Flexibility of Operations

Operations flexibility is one of the greatest SID strengths. For a start, SID will run on setups ranging from a single machine, to clusters of hundreds of nodes, thus making it possible to configure the optimal scale of the system for every scenario. Also, provisioning a SID server couldn't be easier, as the system only uses standard for the .NET world set up. The provisioning process can be automated too.

This allows SID to run in virtually any infrastructure and network topology, including cloud-based clusters, adapting itself to existing infrastructure instead of the other way around. Literally, the only requirement SID has to the environment is to have the necessary version of the .NET Framework.

Providing and Consuming APIs for Integration with Up- and Downstream Applications

SID has a proven track record of operating in a multinational enterprise environment for many years. Throughout this time, SID has had to integrate with many different applications ranging from mission-critical state authority interfaces, to high-volume broker systems, to financial applications.

SID has a powerful engine to provide and consume external application data and services using wide range of technologies starting from simple file exchanges in various formats, to SOAP and REST Web Services.

At the Cutting Edge of the Technology Wave

SID is designed to embrace and adapt to change. As technology moves faster and faster, we see many systems stuck years behind and struggling to catch up. SID is different. Take the user interface as an example:

For its Web frontend technology, SID utilizes modern technologies like the Bootstrap framework, jQuery, HTML 5, CSS 3, Google Charts API and others to provide its users with a sleek, blazingly fast single-page application which looks and feels great on a wide range of devices, from mobile phones and tablets, to laptops, to wide-screen desktop monitors. At the same time, SID's native Windows application uses WPF to bring amazing experience to the desktop users. While different, these two interfaces of course use the same set of SID core and business services and the way SID is built ensures it will be able to adopt virtually any UI technology the future brings.