Leading IT consultancy Northdoor has been presented with a 2012 European Software Award in the ‘Enterprise Solution’ category for its role in developing Ellipse’s online system, a fully automated enterprise-grade solution for quoting, underwriting and other services required to handle Group Risk insurance, which covers employee life assurance and disability benefits.

The European Software Excellence Awards recognise best practice in customer solutions that have been created by Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) across Europe. These are the only pan-European software awards that recognise real world solutions and channel partnerships by highlighting the very best applications that ISVs have developed and delivered for their customers.

“We are delighted to have won a 2012 European Software Excellence Award for our work with Ellipse,” says David Ballard, CEO of Northdoor. “By creating a fully online, 24/7 ‘self service’ portal that enables Independent Financial Advisers (IFAs) to obtain quotes and provide services to their clients both quickly and easily, we have provided Ellipse with a solution that has an enormous impact on the quality of service that they can offer.”

The online solution that Northdoor provided for Ellipse allows IFAs to quote for and service Group Risk insurance both quickly and efficiently, without the need for large teams of support staff behind the scenes. At the same time, the solution’s flexible design makes it possible to engage with multiple partners and users easily, including IFAs, their corporate customers, and even individual employees. A unique aspect of the solution is that although fundamentally a B2B system for IFAs and their clients, it also required a B2C element to handle the underwriting of individual employees. Access to all users is provided at any time, and from any location. Because the size of customer schemes can vary from a handful of individuals to tens of thousands, the entire solution was developed in the Microsoft .NET framework for maximum agility, scalability and ease of integration, with the back end database in Oracle Server.

“Thanks to the systems Northdoor has developed for us, we are able to provide IFAs with easy access to flexible web-based services for the first time in the Group Risk market,” says Eva Schwander, Chief Operations Officer, Ellipse. “We can give IFAs a better, quicker, simpler way of handling this class of business. For these reasons and many more, we believe that Northdoor is a worthy winner of this prestigious award.”