South African Insurance Crime Bureau: IDS vs SAICB

The Insurance Data System (IDS) is the system through which the short-term insurance industry shares information in order to obtain an integrated view of policy applications prior to taking on further risk as well as claims information to streamline claims processing. The IDS allows users to make a transactional enquiry to assess the risk of an individual, risk address and vehicle.

Although the IDS system is invaluable in assessing your risk, the system does not depict patterns and trends holistically from an industry point of view.

The South African Insurance Crime Bureau (SAICB) provides the next step in the process of fighting insurance crime, and specifically fraud. This next step involves using the IDS data (this is information that the industry already shares) and other data that participating companies and other entities might in future decide to share in the fight against crime, to look for organised crime patterns. These organised crime patterns will then be investigated with a view to address organised insurance fraud and related crimes at an industry level.

The SAICB will focus on mining existing information (starting with info shared in IDS) to fight organised insurance fraud at an industry level. The SAICB is a crime fighting organisation, and as such has no interest in providing information on a per transaction basis to its members with regards to anything other than organised crime patterns.

The function of providing information directly to insurers on a per transaction basis is clearly the function of the IDS.