Paragon

Business Need:
A company initiated an aggressive plan to close a non-strategic office, consolidate its infrastructure, and focus on its core business. A critical component of this plan was to find an outsource provider to handle the run-off of its assumed reinsurance business, previously written through an acquired company.

Situation Analysis:
The business was handled on several systems. These included an extremely old legacy system and several in-house claims and accounting systems, which were being discontinued, along with numerous MS Excel spreadsheets and MS Access databases. The company was concerned about the possibility of losing key personnel with knowledge of the affected business and, subsequently, the disruption of core business segments if resources had to be diverted to support the discontinued operations.

Barriers Faced:
The systems used for the discontinued book of business received only minimal support, and knowledge of these systems throughout the organization was very limited. In addition, knowledge of specific reinsurance processes and the Excel and Access information was also limited to a few key individuals. Finally, the company imposed a very tight deadline within which to complete the transition.

Paragon's Action:
The company selected Paragon to provide outsourced reinsurance administration for the discontinued assumed reinsurance business, including retroceded recoveries. Paragon prepared a detailed project plan to transition the business to Paragon and provide ongoing reinsurance administration and processing services.

Within 90 days, Paragon successfully completed the business transition by:

Transferring the business records to Paragon's offices and notifying all parties of the change in administration;
Converting the business from the current systems to a single reinsurance system, consolidating the information from the 3 separate system applications and the Excel and Access tools;
Reconciling all accounting information following the conversion; and
Establishing a process for administering the business within the customer's guidelines.

Results:
Paragon currently manages more than 3,700 active contracts and 2,300 claims for this customer over multiple lines of business, and over $150 million in assumed reserves. Paragon provides complete reinsurance administration services, including reinsurance claims handling, reinsurance and cash accounting, and reinsurance reporting.

Specific benefits provided include:

Consolidation of three systems to a single, comprehensive system;
Real-time update of information and on-line, up-to-date claim activity;
Enhanced reporting capabilities;
Automatic production of Schedule F;
Automatic production of accident-year reporting for Schedule P;
Automatic calculation and tracking of IBNR; and
Elimination of manual record keeping in files.