Leading UK Life Insurer: Marketing Transformation

A leading UK life insurer turned to Accenture for help in bringing innovative products to market quickly and effectively.

This leading UK life insurer needed to increase its speed and agility in bringing to market innovative and profitable life insurance products.

A review of its approach for product development identified a number of opportunities for improvement, including the polling of consumer attitudes, faster speed-to-market due to increased process efficiency and a streamlined best-practices approach to product design.

Accenture worked with the life insurer to review and re-engineer its proposition development processes and to implement a set of tools and procedures to support the end-to-end development lifecycle.

The marketing transformation for this UK life insurer resulted in a number of key benefits including better filtering and prioritization of products; reduction of average product development lifecycle from 250 to 60 days; better alignment of resources and budget allocation; improved compliance with regulatory and legal requirements; ability to measure and monitor performance of the end-to-end proposition lifecycle from concept through to launch and then in-market performance.

The client was operating in an increasingly competitive and crowded marketplace, where the sophistication of the available insurance products meant there was limited opportunity for radical new products due to the complexity of updating these products for new market demands. At the same time, stricter regulations and previous industry challenges with product governance had resulted in increased scrutiny from the financial authorities and auditors.

These factors all contributed to the complexity that made it difficult for the client to develop and launch effective products rapidly.

A review of the current approach for product development identified numerous opportunities for improvement including:

• Development of a long-term, strategic view of the product set and alignment of individual propositions with this strategy
  
  
• Proposition development driven by consumer needs and preferences directly, rather than distributors and intermediaries perception of what these needs are.
  
  
• A faster route-to-market for products through increased process efficiency.
  
  
• Reduction in wastage within the marketing function (40 percent of products under development were never launched, while other products were too often withdrawn immediately prior to, or shortly after, launch).
  
  
• Improved capacity to measure the performance of the end-to-end proposition development process and the subsequent performance of products once they were in the marketplace.
  
  
• Better preparation to ensure that the required internal infrastructure (tested IT solution, communications and literature) is in place at product launch.
  
  
• Ensuring staff are clear on their obligations and responsibilities within the end to end process.
  
  
• More effective allocation of resources to proposition development to maintain productivity.
  
  

Accenture worked with the life insurer to review and re-engineer its proposition development processes and to implement a set of tools and procedures to support the end-to-end development lifecycle, with specific focus on four key areas:

1. Accenture helped the client ensure that there was appropriate governance around proposition development, that decisions were based on evidence and that new offerings had executive sponsorship.
   
   
2. The Accenture team provided a systematic method of forecasting the benefits, requirements, risks and return on investment for potential products, and for qualifying the business case to ensure there is adequate demand from customers and intermediaries.
   
   
3. The client and Accenture worked to ensure internal stakeholders (such as product management, IT, finance and compliance) were engaged at the right time in the development process to ensure that the offer that was taken to market was compliant and that the internal infrastructure was in place to support the launch.
   
   
4. Accenture helped clarify the roles and obligations of participants in the proposition development lifecycle, promoting up-skilling and behavior alignment with the new ways of working. Accenture helped the client put the consumer at the heart of the product development process by integrating identification of customer needs, and validation of those needs, with the customer insight function—a prerequisite to putting a viable proposition forward—and by measuring all products against a set of defined customer measures.
   
   

The marketing transformation for this UK life insurer resulted in a number of key benefits:

• Better filtering and prioritization of products, resulting in increased speed-to-market for successful concepts. Previously approximately 40 percent of products were never launched; wastage has been reduced to approximately 10 percent.
  
  
• Improved speed to market for successful concepts—the average development lifecycle has been reduced from 250 to 60 days.
  
  
• Improved marketing return-on-investment through better alignment of resources and budget allocation in both absolute terms and in terms of time to deliver.
  
  
• Improved compliance with regulatory and legal requirements, reducing the risk of breaches and fines. Our processes directly addressed issues that had previously cost the organization £10m in fines from the industry regulator for product governance issues.
  
  
• The ability to measure and monitor performance of the end-to-end proposition lifecycle from concept through to launch and then in-market performance, with the customer at the heart of development process.
  
  

With Accenture’s help, the operational effectiveness of this UK life insurer’s product development and marketing processes has been improved to create a more agile and effective organization able to respond rapidly to changing business needs and market expectations, and placing the client firmly on the road to high performance.