Why is SOA more important in the Insurance space

I was at the ACORD LOMA 2007 conference and there were a lot of sessions on SOA explaining all the great things we know about SOA.

A point that I felt got missed in the conference was that "SOA is even more important in the Insurance World today as say compared to other verticals"

One of the biggest challanges facing Carriers today is "Legacy Modernization". Carriers want to achieve Straight through processing but it is probably a 100Million investment and atleast a 2-3 year plan to do that.

In the mean time you also have pressures from the market to get your website going (enable realtime functions like InsuranceID Card printing , Update Garaging Address , Add Vehicle , Add Driver etc). The question most carriers face is that - Will the investments I make for my website upgrade go waste as there is a seperate initiative for upgrading my Policy Admin system going ?

--- > Enter SOA
The Hub and Spoke Arcitecture of SOA promises to decouple your front office applications from back office systems. This becomes a very strategic advantage for present day carriers as most of them have a roadmap of upgrading there backoffice systems and also have market pressures to get new front office applications and with SOA the two initiatives do not need to be tightly coupled.

I also hear a lot about "How do I get the business to sponcer an SOA program". So here is one more reason (added to the list here) .

SOA will enable business to get what they want earlier. IF they want an upgraded website and also Straight through processing , the only way to get that is using SOA