Founded more than 130 years ago to carry forward the principles of the fraternal movement – a centuries-old commitment among ethnic groups in rural areas to support one another in times of crisis – Catholic United Financial is a non-profit insurance organization providing benefits to over 74,000 members across Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas. Community service drives every aspect of Catholic United's operations to this day, leading the company to create resources such as "Catholic United Response," a program designed to aid communities affected by natural disasters. A key aspect of this program is a specially outfitted rapid-response trailer built to support disaster-response efforts, assist with clean up activities, and deliver relief supplies to victims whose homes have been damaged or destroyed.
While committed to its fundamental charter as a service-oriented, non-profit, Catholic United competes for business in a modern world. And that means its field agents must have accurate, timely information about any member they may meet with in a given day. To this end, the organization worked with a third-party web-hosting company to build an external interface designed to provide agents with information pertaining to a specific policy holder.
Although this approach yielded a fair amount of useful, user-friendly information, it was not without its drawbacks.
To begin with, the application could only retrieve policy information from the member database over a virtual private network (VPN) connection, which was cumbersome and didn't work in all locations, making it difficult for agents to gain true, anytime, anywhere access to member data.
And, member data had to be extracted and transferred from Catholic United's ClearPath environment to an external web server before it was available, so agents could not be certain they were acting on the most timely, relevant information.
Moreover, the process of transferring data from a secure mainframe environment to a less-controlled external web server introduced the risk of members' sensitive information being intercepted and compromised by hackers or other malicious entities.
- Service: Provided real-time access to information, helping agents analyze policies and generate detailed reports in seconds rather than hours or days
- Automation: Connected core ClearPath transactions to the Web, providing anywhere, anytime access to member information
- Security: Eliminated concerns about sensitive information being compromised as it is moved to the Web