Transcript Leading Global Life Insurance and Pension Group: Business

Leading Global Life Insurance and Pension Group
Business/Technical Architecture Strategy
Client background
This client is one of the world's largest life insurance and pension groups. With
headquarters in Europe, the group employs more than 25,000 people worldwide. Its
businesses serve millions of customers in markets throughout the Americas, Europe and
Asia, with major operations in the United States, the Netherlands and the United
Kingdom.
Business Challenge
Although it was positioned as one of the leading providers of life and annuity products in
the United States, the company was constrained by its complex, legacy-driven
technology and inefficient operating environment. This resulted in lost market
opportunities and decreased profitability. In turn, a new strategic partnership that saw the
company acquire the operations and books of business of two life insurance subsidiaries
created additional problems, including:
• Difficulty in deploying innovative products to the market at speed.
• Reduced service support for its independent field force, coupled with quality issues and
scalability concerns due to manual processes.
• A higher cost of ownership due to multiple policy administration systems, tightly
coupled point-to-point integration and an inability to process e-business cost-effectively.
How Accenture Helped
Accenture led the post-acquisition analysis and planning to integrate the acquired
companies’ IT and business operations. This involved a current state assessment, IT
hypothesis development, target state definition, gap analysis, actionable roadmap
development and business case analysis. Accenture then directed the operations and
technology integration planning effort and defined the future operating model comprised
of the people, process and technology capabilities required to achieve the company’s
strategic objectives. Accenture also helped outline a new product development process
driven by a single policy administration system. Additionally, Accenture helped define the
service-oriented architecture (SOA) capabilities needed to shield policy administration
consolidation from other enterprise systems and enable scalable, cost-effective
business-to-business integration to support key partner and customer service objectives.
As part of the planning process, Accenture helped the company identify and prioritize
gaps between current and future state operations, and helped develop a practical
roadmap to achieve the company’s objectives.
High performance delivered
By relying on Accenture’s expertise and experience, the company now has a roadmap
for the transformation of its technology architecture with transition state objectives and
deadlines, including lift-and-drop technology processes and solutions, data systems
conversions and move-then-improve systems and process strategies. The target state
defined technology capabilities that allowed the company to shield policy administration
from other enterprise systems, enabled business-to-business integration that aligned
with industry standards while cost effectively supporting proprietary, legacy formats, and
facilitating improved customer-centric support by increased integration between
enterprise and customer-facing applications.
The company also has a three- to five-year implementation plan for consolidating
multiple legacy administration systems on a single platform that supports the entire
policy life cycle. The company can realize substantial benefits from the single
administration platform, including the ability to:
• support all open and closed blocks of business
• implement new, innovative products more quickly and at a lower cost using the
“product chassis” concept, which enables a faster go-to-market approach for new
products by making slight variations to a core product already implemented on the
system.
• achieve improved quality and service levels and provide consistent distribution
experience.
In addition, the single administration platform can reduce operating costs through
customer and agent self-service and straight through processing. Operational efficiency
is expected to improve 20 - 30 percent and the client can expect a 20 - 40 percent
reduction in total cost of ownership.
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing
company. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all
industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most
successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become highperformance businesses and governments. With approximately 177,000 people serving
clients in more than 120 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$23.39
billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2008. Its home page is www.accenture.com.
External use approved for some uses. Visit KX for full posting. Posted November 2009.
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