North American Life Insurer: Accenture Life Insurance Platform Implementation

This North American life insurer is a leading provider of retirement solutions, including fixed and variable annuities for individuals.

The insurer operated with a mix of older legacy systems and dated technologies, organized into operational silos with manual and often redundant processes. This resulted in various inefficiencies which eroded profitability and inhibited growth.

The company selected the Accenture Life Insurance Platform (ALIP) to support its new business and policy administration processes. ALIP’s centralized management function now supports routine product and system updates across the company’s multiple software applications and increased speed-to-market for new products. ALIP has also allowed the company to sharpen its competitive edge and reduce IT costs by as much as 30 percent.

This insurer operated with a mix of older legacy systems and dated technologies, organized into operational silos with manual and often redundant processes. This resulted in operational inefficiencies, high unit costs, increased time-to-market and limited scalability—all of which eroded profitability and inhibited growth.

The insurer needed a plan to improve the speed and cost of new product introduction, increase operational efficiency within policy administration functions, and optimize its responsiveness to the demanding needs of the market and regulatory environment. Part of this plan entailed implementing a new policy administration system across all product lines.

The company decided to deploy the Accenture Life Insurance Platform (ALIP) to support its new business and policy administration processes, with initial implementations focusing on the fixed and variable annuity business, and later releases addressing life insurance business needs.

Key elements of the ALIP solution included:

• More robust business rules management and engine functionalities
• Expanded self-service capabilities
• More flexible workflows
• Automated end-to-end business processes

The Accenture Life Insurance Platform’s (ALIP) centralized management function now supports routine product and system updates across the company’s multiple software applications—a functionality it lacked before when it operated under a silo-based structure. Not only did this simplify platform integration during the build phase—it also allowed the company to sharpen its competitive edge and reduce costs during the application’s run state.

The implementation is proving to be very successful from an expense reduction standpoint, with the insurer’s technology support costs alone expected to be reduced by as much as 30 percent. Through the broad functional and process reach of its ALIP solution, Accenture also helped this insurer to:

• Improve speed-to-market.
  
• Support distribution growth and self-service objectives through ALIP’s robust configuration of business rules, flexible workflows and expanded service-based architecture. Where channel variations required customized code and/or development of subsystems to meet specific challenges, ALIP delivered improved agility through its platform.
  
• Support continuous process improvement efficiently and economically through its configurable business rules and workflows.