ICAT selects Thunderhead for catastrophe insurance policy document generation

London, UK/ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum, Las Vegas, USA. Monday 22nd May, 2006.

Thunderhead, the leading provider of enterprise communications technology, today announced that International Catastrophe Insurance Managers (ICAT), the leading North American catastrophe insurance brokerage, has selected the Thunderhead platform to power the multi-channel generation of its insurance policies, policy endorsements and cancellation notices. 

ICAT, a top 100 insurance brokerage, is a leading provider of commercial catastrophe insurance coverage to businesses located in “at-risk” regions of the US. ICAT is currently expanding its operations from a pure commercial insurance focus to also offer individual homeowner policies. ICAT will initially deploy Thunderhead’s Document Generation Platform to quickly scale its insurance operations to enable high-volume production and delivery of its business communications across multiple channels including print, web and PDF.

Following a competitive tender and detailed proof-of-concept process, ICAT selected Thunderhead due to its demonstrated flexibility and scalability. Central to this decision was Thunderhead’s proven ability to dramatically speed time-to-market for new ICAT product and services documentation.  ICAT also cited Thunderhead’s open standards-based architecture and connectivity with ICAT’s existing EMC Documentum enterprise content management (ECM) system as critical factors influencing the selection of Thunderhead.

“As we expand into providing individual homeowner policies, the volume and type of documents we need to be able to generate increases dramatically.  Thunderhead, in conjunction with our ICAT platform, allows us to expand into new markets with a flexible and efficient document issuance platform,” commented Joan Zerkovich, Senior Vice President, Information Technology at ICAT.  “Unlike the other solutions we evaluated, Thunderhead allows our business users to control the creation and maintenance of all our policy documents with automated filing into Documentum.  Our testing proved that the Thunderhead architecture is highly flexible, easy to implement and can scale to meet our future growth.”

In contrast to other, proprietary document generation systems, Thunderhead is designed to enable business users to directly control the development and maintenance of customer communications and is based on an open standards-based architecture.  For ICAT, this means reduced costs resulting from streamlining its document creation and maintenance processes and simplifying the integration with ICAT’s existing ECM system.  Deploying the Thunderhead solution will also result in higher quality communications and superior customer service for ICAT’s partner insurance companies.

“The insurance market is highly competitive, even in specialist markets such as catastrophe cover,” said Glen Manchester, CEO of Thunderhead.  “ICAT has a reputation as one of the industry’s leading technology innovators and can now leverage the Thunderhead platform to rapidly bring to market new solutions, ensuring that its member insurance companies can move quickly to offer new policies based on the very latest risk information.  The flexibility and extensibility of the Thunderhead platform means that new underwriting demands are accurately and seamlessly reflected throughout ICAT’s document generation process.  We’re delighted to have been selected by ICAT after such a rigorous and competitive tender process and it is a testament to the quality of Thunderhead’s technology and the expertise of our staff in understanding and addressing issues facing the insurance industry.”

About International Catastrophe Insurance Managers (ICAT)

ICAT, a Boulder, Colorado-based general agency founded in 1998, is a leader in catastrophe risk underwriting. One of the top 100 insurance brokerage firms in the nation, ICAT provides earthquake coverage throughout the western and mid-western United States as well as wind/hail coverage for Hawaii, the Gulf Coast and Eastern seaboard, including Florida.

Thunderhead will be exhibiting at ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum, Las Vegas, May 22-24, booth 220.