Attachmate Verastream Software Helps Meeùs Modernize Their Legacy Insurance Application

With more than 2,600 employees in the Netherlands and Belgium, Meeùs is one of the largest Dutch providers of insurance, mortgages, and real estate. The company, a branch of AEGON, serves roughly 500,000 private customers and 100,000 business customers. It generates more than € 200 million in annual revenue.

Two Challenges to Overcome

Almost half of Meeùs’ employees use a VT-based insurance application running on an HP 9000 server. This off-the-shelf application, called ANVA, offers broad functionality, including a module that lets Meeùs complete full damage settlements with customers. But Meeùs needed to overcome two specific challenges:

1. Meeùs conducts business with a large number of insurance companies whose acceptance rules and insurance conditions are insufficiently enforced within ANVA. Therefore, a large number of administrative users must manually screen policies to avoid mistakes (and possible claims) in the settlement of a policy. This is a costly, labor-intensive process.
   
   
2. The complex ANVA application, with its many menus and input screens, is difficult to learn. Users also need to manually calculate many items based on available insurance data. Consequently, it can take six to eight months to train new employees to enter a simple family-package insurance policy. With employee turnover of 10 percent, Meeùs was facing high training costs.

Extending ANVA’s Life Span and Business Value

Here is how the ANVA application worked: First, it placed policies, delivered via an Excel spreadsheet, in a queue. Then an insurance assessor would start a COBOL program, edit each policy, and manually input financial bookings and memos into the system. This process was far from the automatic policy delivery and completion that Meeùs was striving for.   

Instead, Meeùs wanted to develop an application with a user-friendly interface that employees could use to quickly and easily input policies. David van der Vliet, software architect at Meeùs, said, “Our goal was to wrap the ANVA application with a graphical front-end and make it a sort of policy machine that does not require time-consuming manual checks.”

A subsequent version of the application would offer multiple financial services, including an insurance-quote function, to customers and partners online.

Simplified Development of .NET Apps

What van der Vliet needed was a way to unlock the ANVA system and make it easy to use. Attachmate Verastream, which is certified for both Microsoft® .NET and BizTalk,® enabled developers at Meeùs to easily generate reusable .NET services representing important ANVA functionality. “.NET support was an important prerequisite in our buying decision,” said Van der Vliet. “The integration between .NET and Verastream is extremely powerful.”

In the future, Meeùs developers will be able to use the Verastream interface for BizTalk Server to design and execute BizTalk Orchestrations that access the ANVA application, without leaving the BizTalk environment.

The Verastream Advantage

Verastream provides a non-invasive, service-oriented approach to integration that lets IT repurpose host functionality without disturbing valuable code and associated business processes. This meant that the .NET application developers were insulated from the complexity and inner workings of ANVA and could focus on building a new application that increased user productivity. It also meant that Meeùs could quickly execute a current initiative while incrementally building the foundation for future projects.

The fact that Attachmate has two offices in the Netherlands—a Benelux sales office and a European headquarters office—was also important to Meeùs. They could immediately access local Attachmate technical support as needed.

Tangible Business Results

Verastream has enabled Meeùs to:

• Boost user productivity with a single, modernized user interface (rather than several complex, character-based screens).
• Integrate acceptance rules and insurance conditions to speed up settlements.
• Create a new front end that automates calculations.
• Reduce training time and expenses

“With Attachmate Verastream we can unlock the complete ANVA application” said Van der Vliet. “If we had tried this with the ANVA interface, we probably would have realized just 20 percent of what we have done today.” He added, “Now we can offer, as a next step, services to external audiences.”