E-products Abound In Life Insurance

Before products can be sold and serviced electronically, insurers need the tools to rapidly develop competitive products, Gorman says. NaviSys Home Office is an integrated solution for developing and administering the latest life and annuity product designs while streamlining back-office underwriting functions, he says.

“Home Offices robust product development functionality helps insurers get life and annuity products to market quickly, supporting the most complex investment-oriented products, including unbundled products,” Gorman says. “Its connectivity with virtually any other front- and back-office system ensures consistency of data and calculations across from the point a product is developed to its sale and servicing.”

According to Gorman, there are a number of advantages to working with NaviSys Front Office and NaviSys Home Office solutions. One is that they are “platform-neutral,” meaning they can operate on virtually any platform and interact with almost any external system.

“They support life insurance and technology standards and streamline core processes,” Gorman says.

Although an enterprise solution, various components of the suite may be deployed on a standalone basis or in various combinations to meet each insurers specific objective, Gorman says. While both NaviSys Front and Home Office suites were launched this year, many of the components within each suite have an existing client base.

Costs are estimated either on a fixed price for the overall project or by a license fee plus time and materials, Gorman says. Prices range widely depending on the scope of the assignment and complexity of the solution NaviSys provides.

Sherwood International, Armonk, N.Y., offers three lines of a product that enable e-commerce in life insurance, property & casualty insurance and reinsurance, says marketing manager William Rich. The products are AMARTALife, AMARTALines and AMARTARisk.

AMARTA is a business process development system designed specifically for the insurance industry, Rich says. Insurance companies can use AMARTA to create software systems that mirror the companys business processes. In the AMARTA context, a business process is a group of work-related tasks that an insurance company engages in during the normal course of its business, Rich says.

AMARTA should not be confused with a software package, he says. It offers many of the advantages of a package, but also many things that a package cannot provide.

“The power of the AMARTA approach goes beyond a package-software way of thinking, enabling a client company to improve its existing automated processes, develop whole new business systems, and reduce the costs associated with the everyday flow of work,” Rich asserts.

Unlike a traditional administrative software package, AMARTA does not require companies to modify their business processes to accommodate a preconceived idea of what should and should not be possible; rather, AMARTA enables a company to design their systems to fit the unique way they conduct business, he says.

AMARTA contains, as a foundation, Sherwoods best practice process models. These models are used as the beginning points of the system implementation, Rich says. They consist of a core set of office processes that is common to most insurance companies throughout the world.

At the highest level, AMARTA process models view the insurance office as a set of familiar business processes such as claims, commissions, client contact, and so on. For each of these business processes, a set of detailed lifecycle models is defined, composed of tasks to be performed by the office staff or, where possible, entirely by the computer, Rich says.

Experience has shown that an emphasis on process and modeling is the most effective way to achieve the ongoing, continuous improvement of a business system, Rich claims. The inevitable business changes dictated by the marketplace can be translated into working software quickly, cheaply, and effectively, he adds.

AMARTA provides a template and methodology for modeling that makes this business-to-technical translation possible in an affordable way, says Rich.

Sherwood does not publish its price list, Rich adds.

Computer Sciences Corporation, Austin, Texas, offers FUTUREfirst, an administration system for the traditional life insurance market.

The platform can be used for the administration of traditional life products on an individual and group basis, according to information from the company.

“It is a comprehensive system designed to handle the complete life cycle of insurance processing including product setup, new business, underwriting, customer service, premium and collection, distribution management and claims,” the company says.

Product features include allowance of death benefit grading on an annual or attained age basis; definition of premiums and benefit periods; support of definition of issue age limits, including variations by state; and definition of volume limits by face amount or number of units.

The prices of CSC products vary according to the size of the company, number of users and other such variables, the company says.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Life & Health/Financial Services Edition, November 26, 2001. Copyright 2001 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.

Copyright 2001 by The National Underwriter Company. All rights reserved. Contact Webmaster