TRAMER (Traffic Insurance Information Center) has been established within the Association of Insurance and Reinsurance Companies of Turkey constitution complying with the 'Traffic Insurance Information Center Act' as published by the government in edition number 25318 of the official gazette in 16/12/2003. TRAMER serves: 1. Turkish Treasury Insurance Head Office 2. The Association of Insurance and Reinsurance Companies of Turkey, and Onroad Traffic Insurance Assurance Account 3. Insurance Companies 4. Authorized agents and Brokers 5. Experts 6. Police Department Head Office 7. Gendarmerie Headquarters 8. Ministery of Health 9. Citizens TRAMER provides its services on the internet only. The insurance companies that hold certificates for operating the 'On Road Motor Vehicles Compulsory Liability Insurance' (The Traffic Insurance) are native members of TRAMER. TRAMER enforces the integrity and the uniformity of exercising the traffic insurance and ensures the prevention of insurance frauds, enhancement of trust to and confidence in the insurance system, the determination of the motor vehicle owners that have not had their vehicles insured, the accuracy of policy billing and other relevant issues by collecting information in a database and updating the database daily providing different levels of reports to related authorities. The member insurance companies are obliged to transfer all the information to TRAMER requested by TRAMER in the format and timeline designated by TRAMER. The insurance members are required to deliver all the records they produce for insurance contracts and damages to TRAMER in the data model determined by TRAMER from 31/03/2004 on. As stage 2 of our project, the vehicle registration data from the police department, the citizenship details and number from the Citizenship Department, the tax file numbers and corporations details data from the taxation department will be integrated into our system. The expenses involving the information systems and staff are provided by the insurance companies by proportion according to their percentages of premiums they produce assessed by the administrative board.

Main results, benefits and impacts

From the time TRAMER started functioning on 1 July 2004, the insurance policies issued were assessed according to the On Road Motor Vehicles Compulsory Liability Insurance (The Traffic Insurance), the tariff and the regulations. 3,493,722 insurance policies were issued between July and December 2003, 1% with surcharged levels (levels 1,2,3) , 29% with regular rate (level 4) and 61% with 20% discount level (7). In the same time slot after TRAMER started functioning in July 2004, 4,267,005 insurance policies were issued, 19% with surcharged levels, 39% with regular rate and 20% with 20% discount level. Total number of policies rose by 22%, number of discounted policies fell by 35% and number of surcharged policies rose by 59.3%. Looking at the new vehicle sales in 2004, 395,442 sales happened between January and June, 396,006 between July and December with a total of 764,448 sales. Beside the new vehicle sales, with the inspections and confidence TRAMER brought to the sector, 404,277 uninsured vehicles were added to the system. In the first 4 months of 2004 (January to April cumulatively) 2,509,335 policies were issued, with 0.5% surcharged and 69.9% discounted. In the same period of 2005 2,997,720 policies were issued with 13.5% surcharged and 44.6% discounted. During January-April 2005 488,385 new policies were produced. Between January and March 2005, 129,684 new vehicles were sold and 2,301,320 new policies were issued. In the same period of the previous year 156,402 new vehicles were sold as a result of low credit rates and 1,908,184 policies were issued. Comparing the two periods show that there is a rise of 20.1% in the number of policies issued. Independent of the new vehicle sales, 263,452 new policies were contributed. TRAMER has played an imported role in providing a healthy infrastructure to the sector and rise in the rate of insured owners within a short one year period.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Lessons learnt

The purpose of the establishment of TRAMER is to contribute to the compulsory insurances issued in our country, to enhance the confidence of insurance holders, and to offer a healthier infrastructure to the sector. Because the benefits introduced concern many parties, the structure of TRAMER was defined to cover all those parties. The model was designed to cover all the parties concerned with traffic and the IT infrastructure of services offered by TRAMER. This model was designed so that any new compulsory insurance that will be added in the future can integrate to the system. The infrastructure is suitable to record insurance policy details as well as transferring loss claims. The will to track the loss claims is to allow Turkish Treasury to monitor the financial weaknesses of the insurance companies. Because of the lack of monitoring the financial weaknesses of the insurance companies in time, the companies, the agencies, the insurance holders and the government face problems, and as a result, the confidence in the insurance sector is weakened. Therefore it is planned to track the loss payment periods from loss data and inspect the insurance companies that fail to pay the loss compensations in time. TRAMER plans to store data from only compulsory insurance types at first stage, and in this scope, has started working on the traffic insurance which holds a big fraction of accident branch. With the TRAMER application as stated in section 3.1, an important amount of premium amounts were contributed by introducing supervision of the sector, the insurance holders owned cheaper insurances and were paid their compensations timely. Fake insurances and fake losses have come to an end. Since the beginning of TAMER in July 2004, the policy records were checked, the policies that do not comply with the tariff and the regulations were reported to request corrections. In may 2005, TRAMER has started studying the damage and loss records to towards the insurance companies that fail to pay compensations in time. (Loss compensation payment period is 8 days after the completion of the required documents.) TRAMER gained huge success nation wide with the 'first step' project. Turkish Treasury, the insurance companies and the citizens benefited from the results of this project. TRAMER's know-how and experience were shared with the support of Turkish Treasury and The Association of Insurance and Reinsurance Companies of Turkey in meetings in international platforms. In this scope, TRAMER has given information about theTRAMER system and compulsory traffic insurances in the Eurasia Insurers Meeting where the representatives from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan participated within the Development of The Insurance Sector in the Eurasia Project conducted by the Turkish Cooperation and Development Agency.