Public Service Archives

Irish Motor Insurance Database Implemented to Help Detect Uninsured Vehicles and Drivers

Each year, insurance claims for uninsured vehicles cost €60-€70m million.

The system will significantly increase the number of detections and reduce the incentive for people to drive without insurance.

According to The Motor Insurance Bureau of Ireland (MIBI), there are about 184,000 uninsured vehicles on the road. This represents about 8.4% or 1 in 12 vehicles, which is very high relative to other countries. The detection of vehicles without motor insurance is a very important task for the Gardai and the Roads Policing unit, in particular. The Insurance industry, in cooperation with Insurance Ireland, the MIBI, An Garda Síochána and the Department of Transport, has implemented a central insurance database which is referred to as the Irish Motor Insurance Database (IMID), which will help identify uninsured drivers. This database is underpinned by Legislation under Section 78A of the Road Traffic and Roads Act (2023), which requires all insurers to provide motor policy information to the database.

The IMID is made up of two separate databases, including the Motor Third Party Liability (MTPL) Database and the National Fleet Database (NFD). The MTPL database contains policy, vehicle and driver details for private motor and small commercial vehicles, while the NFD contains policy, vehicle and driver details for fleet vehicles and motor trade vehicles.

“In Ireland, it’s compulsory for all vehicles to have motor insurance. If any person suffers physical injury and property damage that’s caused by an uninsured vehicle, MIBI will deal with the claim and pay compensation to the victim. MIBI, as a not-for-profit organisation, is financed by levies on the insurance industry which. These levies are ultimately paid by law-abiding insured motorists with €30-€35 included in the premium paid by drivers,” explains Tom O’Brien, Technical Claims Manager at MIBI.

“This puts an extra burden on law-abiding drivers and motor insurance companies while the person with an uninsured vehicle attempts to get away without paying anything. However, the MIBI has strong powers of recovery and will pursue uninsured drivers through the Courts to seek recovery of money that’s paid out in compensation to claimants. The introduction of IMID will be a game changer for the Gardai as they will now be able to immediately check the insurance status of both vehicles and drivers when they interdict a vehicle on the road.”

TEKenable was selected as the preferred solution provider because of the company’s experience and expertise in the marketplace. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, TEKenable could deliver the complex project and develop software to extend the functionality of the solution.

Working closely with the insurance industry, through Insurance Ireland and the MIBI, TEKenable identified the need to provide an efficient and cost-effective solution for insurers and the Gardai to meet the obligations placed on them by the legislation. TEKenable designed and developed the Motor Third Party Liability (MTPL) Database and the National Fleet Database (NFD) which will assist the Gardai in enforcement of insurance requirements in the Road Traffic Act. This will ultimately help to reduce uninsured driving which in turn will reduce premiums and improve road safety. TEKenable implemented the system on Microsoft Azure Cloud as it was perfect for this project from the perspective of security, scalability and rapid solution building. It uses a server-less computing model in Azure with micro-segmentation of services along with SOC/SIEM for security and a PaaS database service handling a number of large-scale data repositories.

The IMID integrates with the underwriting platforms of approximately 40 insurers. When completed, MIBI will provide data to Garda systems, including the Garda roadside mobile application and the National Vehicle & Driver File (NVDF) at the Department of Transport. The IMID is one of the largest financial services databases in Ireland today, as it contains details on over 3m vehicles and over 5 million drivers that are insured to drive those vehicles.

The complex and sensitive database will allow Gardai, the Department of Transport and the MIBI to see real-time insurance data pertaining to motor vehicle policies and the drivers covered by those policies. The IMID will replace an earlier central insurance database (ANPR) that was also developed by TEKenable but is now retired.

“The new system delivers a safeguarded, distributed database that connects insurers, MIBI, the Department of Transport and the Gardai, giving them highly secure access to motor insurance data at any time.

When the data in IMID is shared with the Gardai, it will facilitate live access to insurance data by Gardai at the road side through their mobile devices. This will allow them to check the insurance status of both vehicles and drivers that they have been stopped.

This will help reduce uninsured driving and improve road safety,” concludes Tom O’Brien.

TEKenable built the system, which gives all parties more real-time visibility to the information that is required by all stakeholders. It’s a robust, secure and compliant cloud system. As a technology provider, TEKenable is our partner of choice on this project as the company offers a proactive and innovative service. The team are experts in Microsoft and emerging technologies, and they are always willing to go the extra mile.”

“IMID is a very complex and highly secure system that allows access to public-facing elements as well as closed interfaces that are only accessible to insurers, MIBI, An Garda Siochana, and the Department of Transport. It is a multi-year, multi-million euro insurance industry project that TEKenable played a lead role in designing, developing and ultimately hosting on behalf of the industry,” Tom O’Brien (Technical Claims Manager, MIBI).

International Crisis Accommodation System in Support of Ukraine

Summary

As a result of the war in Ukraine, a large number of refugees are landing in Ireland. The Irish Red Cross has taken the initiative to ask for Pledges from the Irish Public for assistance in housing these refugees on a voluntary basis. TEKenable received an emergency request for assistance from the Irish Red Cross via Microsoft Ireland to help provide them with systems to manage the crisis pro bono. The purpose of this solution was to aid various data collection processes undertaken by the Irish Red Cross with the help of the Irish Army and Auctioneers Association during this crisis.

We delivered a Power Apps Portal for collection of accommodation assessment data from 3^rd parties like Auctioneers Association members from across Ireland. In addition, a Model Driven Power App was created for the Irish Red Cross and partner agencies to process the accommodation approvals and suitability data collected via the Portal. Both apps were delivered within 3 working days from receiving the request to deploying the apps to Production environments.

Scope of Project

The Irish Red Cross has received tens of thousands of pledges for Vacant and Shared Property from the Irish Public to help them house incoming refugees from Ukraine. The Irish Red Cross required a system that allows them to assess the conditions and suitability of each pledged property before they matched refugee families to these properties.

The Irish Army offered to work with the Auctioneers Association across the country to help with the assessment of these pledged properties. The Irish Army call centre organised appointments for the members of the Auctioneers Association to visit each of the properties and complete a property assessment form.

The property assessment forms were required to be available via a responsive (mobile device friendly) web portal or app that would allow submission of the data to the Irish Red Cross.

The Irish Red Cross needed the ability to process this data in a back-office app with the ability to see all the submitted records and publish the data via excel for sharing with their partner agencies and Irish Government Departments as well as to provide statistical analysis for Government Ministers. They also needed to categorise the data easily so they could easily identify Vacant or Shared Properties suitable for specific family sizes or disabled friendly etc.

TEKenable Contribution

After an initial few meeting’s between the Irish Red Cross, Microsoft and TEKenable senior leadership it was agreed that TEKenable would receive a format for each of the different forms required for Vacant Property Assessment and Shared Property Assessment from the Irish Red Cross. In practise due to the pressure placed on the Red Cross TEKenable was required to have more autonomy of decision making that would be usual for a non-crisis project.

TEKenable would than undertake the delivery of the online forms via Power Apps Portal and Model Driven App. TEKenable provisioned a new Irish Red Cross Emergency Tenant for hosting the apps.

Power Automate

We provisioned multiple Environments and Portals and configured Azure DevOps Pipelines to manage the ALM. TEKenable stood up a team of Power Platform consultants to help deliver the required solutions.

The Email Campaign was set up using the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing module. It allowed the IRC to have full visibility of the customer journey, from tracking the initial reminder pledge email that was sent, to viewing which people hadn’t opened the email or overlooked clicking on the pledge link and following up with them accordingly.

This information was crucial to the IRC in understanding the number of people who were still interested in pledging a property and allowed them to confirm the statistics with the government.

Outcome

The Irish Red Cross and TEKenable reviewed the solution demo, and we found the customer satisfied with the Power apps implementation despite the challenging timelines and fluid context. TEKenable provided the Power Apps Portal URLs for the Auctioneers Association members to directly access and start submitting their Property Assessments from their mobile devices.

Data is already being received into Dataverse from the portal and the Irish Red Cross have started matching and sharing extracts of the Dataverse data using the Power Apps Excel Export features.

The users had never used Power Apps previously and were given minimal training and Microsoft Docs article URLs to help them Login, navigate a Model Driven App, use Views and export data to excel so their success is a testimony to the intuitive nature of the platform.

Technology Used

Power Platform Dataverse – Power App – Model Driven

Rapid Delivery of COVID Restart Grant using Power Platform

THE CHALLENGE

On the 15^th of May 2020, Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Heather Humphreys TD, agreed details of a new €250 million Restart Grant, that provides direct grant aid to micro and small businesses to help them with the costs associated with re-opening and re-employing workers following COVID-19 closures.

The Grant is available to businesses with a turnover of less than €5 million and employing 50 people or less, that were closed or impacted by at least a 25% reduction in turnover out to 30th June 2020. The Grant is a contribution towards the cost of reopening or keeping a business operational and re-connecting with employees and customers.

The Minister announced that the Local Authorities would be responsible for managing, processing, and paying the grant to qualified and eligible companies in their catchment area.

THE SOLUTION

Dublin City Council engaged TEKenable to provide a minimum viable product (MVP) using Microsoft Power Platform that would allow Dublin City Council to provide a public-facing application portal to allow qualifying SME’s to submit their Re-start Grant application and to also provide a back-office application that would store the data securely and allow for the efficient, timely and secure processing of applications.

The Government announced the Re-start grant in mid-May 2020, and little or notice was provided to the Local Authorities that they would be responsible for processing the applications in their area. Dublin City Council IT staff were under extreme pressure to have a Grant Management application up and running in a very tight time frame. A system of this scale and size could have taken up to 3-6 months to scope out, design, develop, test, and deploy, the fact that we delivered and went live with a working system in under a week is a great testament to the delivery capability of TEKenable, the proactive and very supportive DCC staff and the power of Microsoft Power Platform technology. The project is of course fully aligned with the Digital Citizen Services agenda enabling the public to interact with state and semi-state services online.

Restart Grant Sample Back Office Screen

The solution comprises a Power Portal for applicants to register and make their application, which includes the upload of proof of account documentation and is stored on the Common Data Service. A back-office Power App provides the workflow for the assessment of applications with verification of details, rejection, and payment authorization and (as shown below) a management Dashboard to allow the assessment team’s management to visualize the workload and progress.

The application process is mobile and tablet friendly and the whole system is accessible by DCC staff while they are working remotely with appropriate security.

Restart Grant Management Dashboard

THE OUTCOME

The required MVP was delivered and live in one week from the initial request. Further functionality was added over the next few weeks and the system is rapidly changed to reflect additional needs and changes to the Restart grant rules as they arise.

“To date the platform has been very well received by those breeders who have made their foal registrations via the new system. It is our objective to incorporate new technology into the General Stud Book, to create user friendly, mobile and efficient systems to meet the demands of the modern breeder.”
Brendan O’Brien – Russell Ferris, CEO Weatherbys

While the project described here is COVID related this is only one point solution built on the Power Platform. This project has firmly demonstrated the benefits of a Low Code solution including speed and cost of delivery, out-of-the-box functionality, and a fully managed platform and other non-COVID-related projects have already been identified for the platform.

HRB LINK – A Unified Health Information System

The Health Research Board (HRB) is a statutory body under the aegis of the Department of Health. The Health Research Board (HRB) is Ireland’s lead agency supporting and funding health research. The HRB’s mission is to improve people’s health, patient care, and health services by leading and supporting research and generating knowledge, then promoting its application in policy and practice. The HRB focuses on research that helps to drive innovation in Ireland’s health system and supports economic development.