RSA: Insurance Business Process Outsourcing

In 2003, RSA, a leading multinational insurance group, set itself an ambitious annualized expense savings target of £270 million (US$528 million), to be achieved by year-end 2008. Key strategies for helping to achieve this target included outsourcing. Accenture, a recognized leader in outsourcing with a reputation for delivering impressive results, was selected to help RSA reach these goals on its journey to becoming a high-performance business. 

To help achieve it’s expense savings goal, RSA knew it needed to improve processes through systems transformation and the selective use of outsourcing. A successful outsourcing program could deliver multiple benefits for RSA including: increased flexibility through alternative resource pools, labor arbitrage savings, and access to highly educated, skilled workforces.

RSA wanted to team with a company that had a history of delivering impressive results for clients. So in November 2003, Accenture—a recognized leader in outsourcing—was formally selected by RSA to deliver business process outsourcing (BPO) services.

Accenture identified key processes suitable for transition to an outsourced model and proposed a phased approach to transitioning operational processes and roles offshore to an Accenture delivery center. To date, 900 of the full-time-equivalent roles in the United Kingdom have been transitioned to the Accenture Delivery Centers in Bangalore and Mumbai, India.

Processes transitioned include customer service and back-office administration across RSA’s sales, service, claims and customer accounting functions. Through the Accenture Strategic Delivery Model— an industrialized approach to deliver outsourcing services rapidly, reliably and cost-effectively—Accenture has laid a firm foundation for the delivery of high-quality solutions and sustainable business value.

Accenture established a flexible training model for its delivery center professionals including RSA-specific training, UK culture instruction and UK regulatory authority requirements. Performance is closely monitored and assessed against a range of metrics and service level agreements.

In the wider implementation, Accenture software assets will gradually replace RSA’s legacy applications, becoming the core element of Accenture’s BPO solution to deliver consistent, high-quality customer service throughout RSA’s global operations.

Accenture High Performance Business research into the characteristics of high-performance businesses in the insurance industry has revealed that insurance companies need to better manage across the hard and soft market cycles to increase their competitiveness.

Accenture’s deep industry experience and strategic insights helped identify business process outsourcing opportunities. Extensive experience in developing offshore operations then helped ensure that Accenture transitioned all planned activities to its delivery centers in India on time and according to plan.

In addition to reducing costs, since outsourcing to Accenture, RSA’s customer satisfaction has improved and is consistently high, placing RSA firmly on the path to becoming a high-performance business.

“Overall I am impressed with the quality of the operations in Bangalore” stated Bridget McIntyre, RSA chief executive-United Kingdom. “I see your operation as key to our ambitions in the UK. I will continue to take personal responsibility through my team to ensure that we are working with you to deliver excellent service to our customers and take advantage of the additional opportunities the BPO operation provides.”