Innovation in the insurance industry

To help the insurance industry meet their goals, IBM offers new approaches to address key strategic business issues like being more responsive to the market, quickly identifying and acting on opportunities and managing resources better.

To learn more about IBM’s perspective, read the white paper from the IBM Institute of Business Value. It is titled as “Insurance 2020: Now what? Exploring initiatives for innovation”This white paper details what insurers can do to embrace the change and innovation needed to succeed, including three approaches to business model innovation:

1. Industry model innovation—moving into new industries, redefining existing industries or creating entirely new ones, and identifying and leveraging unique assets.
2. Revenue model innovation—generating revenue by offering reconfigurable products and services and pricing models.
3. Enterprise model innovation—changing the extended enterprise and networks with employees, suppliers, customers and others, including capability and asset configuration
   

(Details as provided on the website of IBM)

Similarly, report titled as "Insurance 2020: Innovating beyond old models" is also published by IBM earlier.

Role of Insurance Companies towards Climate Change

Today climate change due to global warming is hot topic not amongst only environmentalist, industries but also for insurance companies.

A new report is published on the topic which assessed the 41 insurance firms of UK Insurance Industry who have signed up to the ClimateWise initiative, a coalition designed to help co-ordinate the sector's response to climate change. The report has concluded that Insurance companies should be doing more to exploit the opportunities presented by climate change through the development of new products such as cover for carbon markets and rainforests.

Moreover, despite widespread acceptance that climate change risks, such as the increased frequency of severe weather events and rising sea levels, will pose a major threat to property and businesses, many insurers are still not considering climate change risks when developing corporate insurance policies.

It is suggested that research into the dangers of climate change is playing an important part in public policy making, while half of insurers have designed products or services to help customers reduce their carbon emissions.

In this direction, last week The European Commission announced €24.5m (£20m) in funding to a new World Bank-backed scheme designed to allow developing countries to take out insurance against the increased risk of climate-change related storms and extreme weather events.

Thus, Commission is the first donor to the Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF), a scheme set up by the World Bank's International Finance Corporation (IFC) and intended to make it easier for African, Caribbean and Pacific countries to access insurance cover for extreme weather events.

It is expected to prove more effective than traditional insurance cover for developing countries because it does not require detailed and costly damage assessments and is based on easily verifiable indices, limiting the likelihood of payment disputes. As a result insurers enjoy lower costs and payouts can be made more swiftly to affected firms and populations.

The World Bank is hoping that the approach can provide a model for the insurance industry to emulate.

References:
1. Insurers urged to offer cover for carbon markets
2. EU backs climate change insurance model for developing world

Global Insurance Business

Insurance industry world wide is trying to expand their business especially in new emerging markets. On this line a research report titled as “Barriers to Global Insurance Business Operations: The Situation in Brazil, China, India, Mexico and Russia” is published (January 2008) by The Geneva Association which is made available online. The report is authored by Julian Arkell.

In the foreword it is mentioned that it is contribution to the analysis and debate on issues surrounding the entry of foreign insurance companies into large emerging markets.

The report gives overview of global insurance in terms of business operations, insurance regulations, global trade issues and detailed picture of each of the five countries of the legal, market and trade situation, both particular to the insurance sector and more generally if relevant to commercial environment for insurers and consumers of insurance products. It also provides comparable factors and statistics on the five countries.

First National Education Day – 11 November 2008

First National Education Day – 11 November 2008

Wish you ‘Happy Education Day’

Educational institutions at all levels across the country are celebrating November 11 as the 'National Education Day', commemorating the birthday of Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, an eminent educationist and the first Union Minister of Education of independent India.

As India's Education Minister, Azad oversaw the establishment of a national education system with free primary education and modern institutions of higher education. He is also credited with the foundation of the University Grants Commission (UGC), an important institution to supervise and advance higher education in the nation.

President Pratibha Patil is inaugurating the National Education Day today in New Delhi. The Ministry of Human Resource Development, had on September 11, 2008 announced, "The Ministry has decided to commemorate the birthday of this great son of India by recalling his contribution to the cause of education in India. November 11 every year, from 2008 onwards, will be celebrated as the National Education Day, without declaring it a holiday".

In view of first National Education Day, this post is dedicated to Dr. S.R. Ranganathan, who is popularly known as "Father of Library Science" in India.

Alma Mater Library

We support Open Access

First Open Access Day to be Held Oct. 14

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition; www.arl.org/sparc), the Public Library of Science (PLoS; http://www.plos.org/), and Students for FreeCulture (http://www.freeculture.org/) have jointly announced the first international Open Access Day. Building on the worldwide momentum toward Open Access to publicly funded research, Open Access Day is designed to create a key opportunity for the higher education community and the general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access and use of content.

Open access has wider implications for all including students, researchers, publishers, academicians and also librarians!!!

To celebrate this occasion, Alma Mater Library (AML) would like to:

1. Create awareness about Open Access through News Updates by email
2. Announce sources of information available through Open Access
3. Initiate discussions amongst users about Open Access

We also welcome everybody's participation on this sensitive issue, which deals with our working, academic and professional life. Please do share your experiences.

Alma Mater Library

AML Blog

Dear Users,

We are very happy to start this new service for our users. Our aim to keep in touch with our valuable users through this powerful tool of “Blogging”.

At the same time, we hope that our users will definitely appreciate this service as they can participate in this with their active support through comments & querries. Your feedback is very important to us!!

Advantages of the AMLBlog to users:

• Interactive medium for users to communicate with library staff
• Latest insurance news
• Announcements from library regarding various activities and useful resources
• Immediate alret through email subscription or by RSS mechanism which will keep you updated

Alma Mater Library Team

Library Membership

The library membership is open to persons working in insurance companies especially in Pune. The fees and other details will be conveyed to persons interested individually. Please send your queries by email to bsane@niapune.com

Welcome to Alma Mater Library's Blog

Dear Users

Our Alma Mater Library (AML) is more than 25 years old and is considered as best insurance library for both life and non-life insurance industry in India. Besides strong collection in Insurance area, library has good collection in Actuarial Science, Management, Finance, Economics, Training, General Awareness, and Entertainment.

We serve our parent organization National Insurance Academy (NIA) which is much known for its insurance academics and rejuvenating management development programmes as for its theme destinations. National Insurance Academy is located on a 32 acre land charming in every detail. Situated opposite to Chhatrapati Shivaji Sports City to the left of Mumbai-Bangalore Express Highway, the campus is 15 kms. from Pune Railway Station and 24 kms. from Pune Airport.

Mission:

To support Training, Education, Research & Publication architecture of NIA and NIASoM

Objectives:

1.To act as ‘knowledge resources provider’ for the insurance and allied industry personnel.
2.To inspire academic activities like reference, research and authorship.
3.To encourage extra curricular activities like environment management and social services.

Collection:

The collection includes:

• Books – 20300+
• Programme Folders – 1580+
• Newspapers – 14
• Journals – 164
• Bound Volumes – 3000+
• VCDs/CDs – 1650+

We are subscribing following databases:

• SSC Online
• EBSCO Business Source Elite
• ProQuest Management Database by ABI Inform

Services Offered:

1. Information services like CAS (Current Awareness Service), SDI (Selective Dissemination of Information)
2. Reference service
3. Photocopy service
4. Bibliographies on demand
5. Circulation of documents
6. News Broadcasting
7. Key Words In Context (KWIC) service

Facilities provided:

1. OPAC (Online Public Access catalogue) and WebOPAC
2. Digital reference desks
3. Visitor log system
4. Acess 24X7 to:

• Library Intranet
• Alma Mater Academic Library (Digital Library)
• Reading room