1. July 20161
APACCIOOUTLOOK.COM
SaaS SPECIAL
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July-01-2016
Connecting the Enterprise IT Community in Asia Pacific Countries
COMPANY OF THE MONTHIN MY VIEW
CEO INSIGHTS
Esker
Jean-Michel Bérard,CEO
Naveen Gulati,
CIO,Ricoh India Ltd.
Frank T.Troise,
MD & Head of Digital Distribution
(Asia),Leonteq
MERIMEN
TECHNOLOGIES
NAVIGATING THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY WITH
CLOUD BASED COLLABORATION PLATFORM
Trevor Lok, CEO
3. July 201611
MERIMEN
TECHNOLOGIES
NAVIGATING THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY WITH
CLOUD BASED COLLABORATION PLATFORM
he turn of twenty-first century has witnessed dramatic reformation in two
realms— family income and softening of global crude oil prices. As the oil
prices descended, vehicles became indispensable and number of vehicles
plying on the roads spiked up. The report published by International
organization of Motor Vehicle (OICA) clearly indicates that there has
been a sharp rise in the number of cars sold around the world and that
25 million more units were sold between 2005 and 2016 than the decade
earlier. Today, people own classy vehicles including Chrysler 300, BMW
M6, Audi, Mercedes-Benz and many more than ever before. While these
are the necessities of few, the sky-high demand of Maruti, Hyundai and
Honda’s variable ranges of cars, including the pollution free battery
operated cars, has also drastically increased over the years.
SaaSSOLUTION PROVIDERS - 2016
By Stephanie Mazuera
4. July 201612
This sharp rise in car sales can
be attributed to the fact that a
personal car is still considered the
most desirable mode of transport,
especially for businesses and families.
However, ownership of a personal
vehicle is a double-edged sword.
While a car ensures convenient
means of regular transportation,
even a small mishap while driving
can prove to be disproportionately
costly for the car owner. And not
surprisingly, this steep rise in vehicle
sales has also contributed to an
equally sharp rise in road accidents,
which has, in turn, increased the
number of accident claims handled
by the insurance companies.
Involvement of multiple stake
holders such as the repairer, adjuster
and insurance claim personnel
makes the insurance claims process
unnecessarily cumbersome and time
consuming. In spite of deploying
digitally managed work flows and
documentation process within
an organisation, it is the lack of
collaboration among all stakeholders
that impedes the overall settlement
process. Realising these drawbacks
in the insurance industry, Merimen
was incepted in 2000 to build an
online collaboration platform to ease
the settlement process. The idea is to
leverage internet-based technologies
to help organisations participating
in the claims process. Trevor Lok,
CEO, Merimen, explains, “Merimen
is now a leading provider of
enterprise solutions for the motor
insurance industry. Our Software-
as-a-Service (SaaS) platform is the
most preferred choice in the Asia-
Pacific region.”
Boosting Collaboration in Claim
Settlements
Each claim process involves
multiple to-and-fro conversations
with multiple parties i.e. lawyers,
repairers, adjusters, who work in
their own operational sphere. This
often results in miscommunications,
delays, human errors, inconsistencies
in statuses and therefore, offers no
overall visibility on the progress.
In addition, lack of transparency
and actionable insights increases
the overall cost of monitoring
and investigation.
Merimen combines technology
expertise with its extensive knowl-
edge of insurance claims processing
and underwriting practices gathered
over the years. Its industry leading
SaaS platform—eClaims— facilitates
insurance claim processing and adds
businesses value to general insurers.
Its prowess lies in building an inte-
grated ecosystem of collaboration
among stake-holding organisations
and creating value for all the partici-
pants by virtue of increased efficiency
achieved through seamless collabora-
tion. Merimen's platform enables in-
surance companies to implement full
life-cycle solutions at a lower risk and
lower cost environment. The com-
pany's pay-as-you-use billing model
lowers the entry barrier for small and
medium sized organisations. Trevor
Lok enumerates, “As of now, about
120 insurance companies, 5000 mo-
tor repairers, 2000 insurance inter-
mediaries, and 500 loss adjusters and
law firms are using Merimen's SaaS
platform in their claim settlement
work-flow.”
Merimen Technologies’ Claims
platform facilitates collaboration
among all stakeholders involved
in an insurance claim settlement
process. The company's cloud
based SaaS platform creates a
unified collaborative work flow for
streamlined communication among
participants, allowing parties to
transact, manage and process end-
to-end motor as well as non-motor
claims. During claim settlement
process, the extensive data collected
is in turn consolidated into a
comprehensive analytics suite of over
100 standard and industry reports,
and KPI charts to provide actionable
insights. The ability to automate
repetitive tasks aids in the processing
and results in faster settlements.
Merimen's platform comes with
other complementary modules,
which are used within the insurance
ecosystem as tools to either directly
reduce the claims costs, or indirectly
via a reduction in the claims
assessment costs. The 'eTender'
module, for instance, facilitates online
tendering of loss or theft-recovered
wrecks. Interested buyers may bid for
these items and make the purchase
online. Similarly, the platform comes
with the 'eSource' module, which
creates an ecosystem for online
sourcing of auto parts for use in
5. July 201613
collision repair, to obtain competitive
rates from suppliers. The module
helps in resolving the motor claims
in cost effective and timely manner.
Yet another module, eXchange
offers a platform for the exchange of
information and documents between
different organizations, especially
between insurers, and thus, enables
implementation and tracking of the
subrogation recovery process. Trevor
Lok expounds, “Merimen clearly
knows that without an integrated
platform for collaboration and a
centralised document repository to
store case documents such as accident
reports, surveyor reports, policy
information, accident pictures and
videos, digital documents are shared
among parties with no proper audit
trail and case reference.” The process
remains unstructured and inefficient
for sharing, storing and retrieval of
important files. Merimen's solutions
solve this problem effectively with its
eXchange module.
Automated Policy Enabler
The creation of insurance products,
with its associated underwriting
and rating rules, can be a complex
undertaking. For a solution provider
like Merimen, the challenge comes
from creating good tools for our
clients to configure and automate
the new products. Any delay results
in a longer time-to-market (hence
possibly missing the best launch
window) and only partial automation.
Merimen's ePolicy product provides
a platform for real-time processing
and automation of policy-related
transactions. The policies offered by
the insurers are created and managed
in ePolicy, including the associated
underwriting and premium rating
rules. It enables usage by three key
parties in an insurance policy—
Insured, Insurer and Intermediaries,
to interact through Merimen's
integrated platform. Apart from its
flagship solutions—eClaims and
ePolicy, Merimen also provides
industry-wide solutions which
include features such as country-level
centralized accident/claim reporting,
No-Claim Discount (NCD) enquiry,
centralized certification of repair
shops, and standardized subrogation
recovery platform which is used by all
insurance companies.
Operational Aspects Promoting
Multitude of Growth
Trevor Lok, exclaims, “There are
two aspects of our operations of
which we are particularly proud of:
Merimen’s customer retention rate
and strength of our technical team.”
Merimen’s customer churn rate so
far is zero percent. Only excluding
handful of customers who underwent
M&A or those who restructured
their business, the company was
successful in retaining all its eClaims
customers working with it, since
day one. Even for ePolicy, over the
years, the company has maintained
a very high success ratio. And, this
reflects the best testimony to the
company’s record of continuous
improvements of solutions and its
ability to remain pertinent to its
customers’ dynamically evolving
needs. Secondly, Merimen’s unique
technical team has immensely helped
it to create best-in-class solutions
in the industry. For instance, the
company has been using AJAX since
2001, even before the term AJAX was
coined, a fact that shows the ingenuity
of its technical team. For reference,
the Gmail application, which was
launched in 2004, was among the
first well known applications to use
AJAX extensively.
The company works with its cus-
tomers in close proximity to achieve
very fast roll-out and then builds
upon the live system with continu-
ous use-learn-enhance cycles. This
ensures delivery of robust implemen-
tations that stays relevant over time
as Merimen’s customers operating
requirements evolve.
The Malaysia headquartered
company presently has nearly 120
insurance clients in APAC region,
mainly in South East Asia. To further
serve its customers, the company
is looking forward to expand its
product offerings under the banner
of eClaims and ePolicy, with added
features covering areas such as data
science and analytics, fraud detection,
and geo-location. Merimen is also
thinking afresh about ecosystem
expansions. For doing this, the
company is adding more participants
into its ecosystem of users, such as
on-site surveyors, warranty repairers
(for extended warranty insurance),
salvaged parts purveyors, financial
institutions, medical institutions and
others. Last but not the least, the
company also intends to flourish
geographically across North East
Asia, South Asia, Middle East, and
Europe. With multi-pronged growth
plans, Merimen Technologies has
come up as a pioneering leader in
the insurance services industry and
aims to remain at the forefront in the
foreseeable future.
Merimen’s
industry leading
SaaS platform—
eClaims—
facilitates
insurance claim
processing and
adds businesses
value to general
insurers
6. Description:
Company:
Merimen Group of
Companies
Leading SaaS insurance
solution provider in Asia
Pacific that utilises Software
as a Service (SaaS) in the
motor insurance industry
Key Person:
Trevor Lok
CEO
Website:
merimen.com
T
he most palpable change that cloud
computing has brought forth in the
recent years is the widespread adoption
of Software-as-a Service (SaaS) by the
enterprises. Also referred to as web-based
software, on-demand software, or hosted-
software, SaaS is all about delivering software
applications over the Internet. To the greatest
possible extent, SaaS strives to overcome the
challenges—such as on-demand, speed, agility,
competitive pricing and scale—faced by the
corporate IT in their day-to-day operations.
Unlike traditional software, which is unwieldy
and needs specialized hardware to go with, a SaaS
application runs on a SaaS provider’s servers or
on public cloud. So, it liberates enterprises from
the onus of installing, upgrading and maintaining
the software on a regular basis. SaaS service
provider manages access to the application
and takes care of the security, availability, and
performance issues, giving customers seamless
access to their data from any of the networked
devices. With the benefits SaaS brings along, it
only makes sense for the corporates to transition
to SaaS platforms from their legacy, on-premise
software deployments.
Given that the market is swarming with
SaaS service providers, picking a particular
agency is often a daunting exercise. Thus, to
help businesses take the right decision while
choosing their SaaS partner, the editorial team
at APAC CIOOutlook has critically evaluated
a slew of service providers based on their
domain expertise and service offerings. This
particular issue of APAC CIOOutlook features
some of these organizations that have been
able to deliver phenomenal results year-after-
year and have already positioned themselves as
market leaders in terms of skills, experience and
technological capabilities.
JULY 2016 APACCIOOUTLOOK.COM
25 Most Promising SaaS Solution Providers 2016
SaaS SPECIAL
