Enhancing insurance regulation using information technology: the Uganda Motor Insurance Database

Abstract

This research sought to investigate the practices in motor insurance underwriting and supervision in Uganda, and to establish how information technology can be used to enhance the supervisory role of the Uganda Insurance Commission (UIC). Using qualitative research methods, the study revealed that an integrated information sharing platform could provide great improvements to the manual and paper based processes used in motor third party insurance underwriting and regulation in the country. The research made an extensive review of literature in the domain of insurance regulation so as to establish trends and determine the need for an information technology based supervisory system. The literature review further looked at issues regarding database integration, including topics like data warehousing, data federation, data mediation, data mining and business intelligence. The research therefore developed a prototype web enabled motor insurance database to capture data from the various information systems used by insurance companies in Uganda. The data is stored in a central database, and access is provided to authorised users through a secure web interface. The database presents users with various statistical reports and can further be mined for business intelligence using online analytical processing tools (OLAP). The database was designed on an n-tiered client-server architecture with distributed network computing.