LOMA

LOMA is the world’s largest provider of education and training to the global financial services sector. Founded in 1924, LOMA is an international association through which more than 1,200 insurance and financial services companies from over 80 countries engage in research and educational activities to improve company operations. LOMA members are involved in life and health insurance, managed care, annuities, pensions, banking, bancassurance, securities, and other financial services areas. Its U.S. member companies alone account for approximately 95 percent of the more than 18 trillion dollars’ worth of life insurance in force in the United States today.

The Background

Every year, employees in financial services organisations throughout the world enroll for more than 100,000 LOMA examinations covering insurance and financial services topics. Traditionally this training was provided through self-study textbook methods. However, with the arrival of online delivery, LOMA established the LOMALearn Online e-learning Portal to allow its members’ employees and independent students greater options to meet their professional and performance training goals .

The Solution

LOMA needed a best-of-breed technology to manage and deliver its content via the LOMALearn portal. It looked at a number of solutions before entering into a partnership with WBT Systems. Today, LOMALearn is powered by WBT’s award-winning TopClass Learning Management System/Learning Content Management System (LMS/LCMS). The superior tracking and reporting functionality offered by TopClass helps LOMA customers meet regulatory checks for employee training and certification. Additionally, LOMA members can also opt to develop their own privately branded online learning sites through an application service provider (ASP) model provided by LOMA. In this way, LOMA customers can incorporate their own look and feel into their online course offerings and also purchase specific modules or full courses, mix and match topics and customise the content to meet specific business requirements. The ASP offering enables LOMA’s customers to develop their own learning and knowledge management programmes quickly and with little upfront capital expenditure and IT infrastructure.

The Future

Using the superior functionality offered by TopClass, LOMA has continued to expand its course library and learning opportunities for its membership. Additional content offerings and functionality are planned for 2006.

Quote

“LOMA’s text-based programmes have been an industry standard for more than 70 years. We looked long and hard at the many elearning systems on the market and found WBT’s TopClass product to be the best solution to meet LOMA’s and our member’s needs. The WBT system allows us to provide our outstanding insurance and financial services content in a variety of formats, allowing customers to choose topics to meet specific learning needs and to add their own material to create co-branded courses and programmes. Our relationship with WBT allows us to provide our customers with a superior system for online deliverywhether they access the LOMA site directly or work with us to create a companyspecific interface on our site.”

Tom Donaldson, LOMA President and CEO, FLMI, CLU