Security Benefit: Policy Administration

Security Benefit is based in Kansas and has more than 100 years of experience in the financial services industry with $19.3 billion in assets under management in 2007. It provides retirement plan services and investment products. Security Benefit also provides an array of financial programs to various markets and offers investment options through partnerships with leading money managers.  
  
The collaboration reduced costs and cycle times—more importantly, the new platform enabled speedier introduction of new products, thus helping the company to achieve high performance.

The executive team at Security Benefit determined that the company needed a new administration system as part of an overall IT transformation strategy. This strategy would better align Security Benefit’s technology with its changing business model, taking advantage of innovations to leapfrog the competition by dramatically reducing speed to market for new products.

To move toward high performance, Security Benefit sought to:

• Replace its twin mainframe administrative systems with a single rules-based platform.
   
• Develop new supporting downstream applications and complete full integration of technology solutions across the enterprise-wide processing platform.
   
• Reduce IT and direct service costs while increasing customer service capacity, efficiencies and quality.
   
• Enable a shorter product development life cycle and speed cost/benefit analysis for product changes.
   
• Shorten system backup times and improve front-office technology and service delivery capabilities.
   

Security Benefit selected Accenture to provide its new policy administration system and in just eight months the Accenture Life Insurance Platform (ALIP) was fully implemented and operational. All legacy mainframe systems were decommissioned within two years of going live on the new platform. This included a conversion of more than 250,000 policies from multiple administration platforms.

Together, Accenture and Security Benefit created an integrated and dedicated team, which proved to be the key to the success of this project. Five IT professionals and three business-side staffers were responsible for creating interaction between IT and business interests and breaking down any barriers to the Accenture Life Insurance Platform’s implementation.

Accenture and Security Benefit worked together to develop an innovative conversion approach, taking the guesswork out of a process that is normally very complex and difficult. Two project managers—one from Accenture and one from Security Benefit—reported together every three weeks to the company’s program management office that oversees all corporate-wide projects.

Accenture has continued to support the maintenance and enhancement of the platform, which is playing a key role in helping Security Benefit advance still further on its journey to achieve high performance.

The company currently processes more than 1 million customer accounts per year. Specific benefits delivered include:

• Cost savings of approximately $7 million per year, with direct service cost per policy reduced by 45 percent.
   
• Significant gains in customer service capacity and efficiency, with policies per full-time equivalent increasing by 120 percent; customer service costs lowered by 31 percent; cost per transaction decreased by 27 percent; transaction volumes increased by 50 percent; and overall quality improved (with an average quality level of 99.8 percent).
   
• IT costs decreased across the board, with IT staff reductions of 35 percent; infrastructure costs lowered by 23 percent and PC help desk costs reduced by 25 percent.
   

The improved processing times and front- and back-office integration lowered cycle time to less than an hour and reduced the number of applications and systems. This enabled faster cost/benefit analyses to determine feasibility of product changes, facilitated a shorter product development cycle, cut new product rollout time by 65 percent while tripling new product releases. Finally, system backup time decreased to two and a half hours with no staff overhead.