Axe

ARPC is a statutory authority established under the Terrorism Insurance Act 2003 to provide reinsurance cover for terrorism losses. ARPC ensures that terrorism reinsurance is available to all insurers who write insurance contracts over eligible property in Australia.

ARPC is well known in the national and international marketplace. As at 30 June 2006 it had received premiums from over 220 general insurers and in the 2005-06 financial year recorded over $103 million in gross written premium.

ARPCs client base includes 219 active clients from 26 countries. There was potential for numerous versions of aggregated reports which would need to be standardised.

ARPCs client's data is extremely market sensitive, and security measures had to be set in place to protect it. Because reporting to ARPC was manual in the first phase of the project, it was cumbersome to update the register of what had, and what had not, been lodged successfully.

Manual data processes create the risk of misinterpretation or mishandling of data. The ARPC process had to be automated to make it faster, simpler and less prone to allowing errors to slip through. The new system also gave ARPC the flexibility to “slice and dice” the data, so detailed  analysis of property exposures could be determined and the agency could keep close track of its potential exposures and liabilities.

The ARPC Online Risk Aggregator System (ARAS) - an internet-based system that effectively and effectively streamlines ARPC’s data collection - gives this government agency much greater flexibility in analysing and using the data it collects.

The implementation of this tool for complex data gathering has cut processing time down from several weeks to virtually nil. It has enabled over 200 insurance companies to deal with ARPC easily, and created a faster, more secure and auditable process.

An internet-based system consisting of two parts, one for use by ARPC clients on the internet, and one for use by ARPC staff on their intranet. Both sites are branded in accordance with required standards applicable in each situation. The internet and intranet have security authentication, including username and password logins.

ARAS allows ARPC’s clients to:

• Upload their spreadsheets to ARAS over the internet. The spreadsheets are validated in real-time

• Add or modify their risk data interactively via web forms

• Choose to upload a spreadsheet or interactively enter values

• Have exceptions logged for review by ARPC.

ARAS also allows ARPC to produce up-todate reports on:

• Which clients have successfully added data (and those who have not)

• Exposures and exposure summaries

• View the client exception log

• Manage email notifications to all ARPC clients who have not submitted data

• Manage the ability for clients to submit new data and to manage the year that clients are submitting for

• Manage client users and details.

ARAS is hosted at Treasury’s IT hosting centre at Canberra.

Neil Weeks, Chief Executive Officer for ARPC, says the implementation of ARAS has slashed the time it takes ARPC to collate and analyse the data it receives from insurers.

The implementations and development of ARAS by Axe Group has been an effective solution to the problem faced by the ARPC.

The benefits of ARAS include:

• Faster validation of ARPC’s client data

• Faster aggregation of ARPC’s exposures

• Provide an industry “best practice” process for ARPC to interface with clients

• Up-to-date ARPC management reporting of:
        
        • Exposures
        
        • Status of lodgement by clients to ARPC

• Better security for handling sensitive market data

• Lower costs in the medium term.