The promised digital new world for life insurers comes with a severe potential downside: vendor lock-in #
Digital transformation in life insurance promises stakeholders the ability to create enhanced customer experiences, leverage advanced analytics, automate processes, and accelerate innovation. Carriers that can take advantage of these opportunities will gain competitive advantage in the market because of their increased efficiency, reduced resource needs and ability to harness customer knowledge to drive sustainable growth.
However, taking advantage of those opportunities requires true digitalization throughout the organization. Transformation benefits can’t be fully realized without replacing legacy policy administration systems (PAS) with state-of-the-art platforms that enable APIs, integration with the entire ecosystem, accelerate product changes and new product development and the free all data for use in real time front-end solutions, analytics and AI applications.
Business and administrative teams are, sometimes overlooked, critical policy admin system users #
Modern PAS have incredible flexibility, providing insurers with the ability to create and work with very complex products. And a lot of work has been done to create tools for technical staff that enable rapid configuration, testing and release of these types of insurance solutions.
But it’s the business-side teams who use the PAS day-in and day-out to accomplish functions vital to the carrier’s core operations. These teams may include:
- Pricing team: responsible for importing and updating rates
- Product team: define and manage products as well as defining and managing product bundles for marketing campaigns
- Change managers: publish changes to rates, products and bundles
- Underwriters: assess risk, determine coverage, and set premiums.
- Claims adjusters: review claims, assess damages, and authorize payments.
- Sales & marketing managers: review agent performance, sales cycles and campaign performances
- Billing teams: track payments and accounts receivable
Creating the types of outputs required in these roles is often a challenge because few good technological solutions exist that simplify or even make it possible at all for them to execute core tasks like rate changes, product changes or the creation of bundles of products for new marketing campaigns.
Many of those tasks still require the carrier to engage their PAS vendor to provide the necessary changes. And so, ultimately, the carrier has no independent control over activities critical to its core delivery and success.
Equisoft/empower frees business teams from vendor dependence #
Equisoft/empower solutions are built specifically for those users who have been ‘forgotten’ by many PAS vendors. These tools are made to empower and accelerate carriers towards achieving self-sufficiency by enabling non-technical business operations to be conducted independently and efficiently.
So, when carriers are looking for PAS modernization solutions and selecting the right partner for their projects, they should be looking for, not just the best technical policy admin solution, but the one that will provide them with the quickest and best path to autonomy from the vendor.
Carriers need to view PAS solutions through the lens of what features does each system have that will enable our people, whether on the IT or business side of the company, to do their jobs most effectively and without having to engage with the vendor for anything they require.
The solution #
As part of their SaaS offering the best modern PAS provide tech solutions that address both IT configuration needs and provide easy to use, non-IT or vendor reliant interfaces that will enable managers and line staff without IT backgrounds to implement a wide variety of changes that traditionally required coding or intervention by the vendor.
Think of these two tools as: A) a configuration solution that enables easy config, testing and release management for IT, and then B) a self-service solution that sits as a layer on top of that configurator and provides a user-friendly platform that is pre-integrated with any PAS or front-end tool for administrative teams.
The value proposition of Equisoft/empower is that it enables carriers to achieve self-sufficiency and promote growth by enabling nontechnical business and marketing operations to manage their products without having to ask IT or vendors to make changes.
Equisoft/empower creates a single source of truth #
The self-service solution is usually bundled with the PAS to make policy administration streamlined and effective for all carrier staff. But it can also be a stand-alone tool that enables a carrier with multiple PAS to create a single source of truth for a wide variety of use cases, such as:
- Rate management
- Product definition management
- Release
- User management
- Product hub
- Bundling hub
- Quality Assurance
- Create and use product templates
All of these are available in one place, without having any knowledge of how to use an IDE or how to do configuration. They are able to connect with all solutions from PAS to middle office distributor systems to front end sales and service apps regardless of which vendor they are from.
True Self-sufficiency #
From development to admin tasks, these low-code IDE and carrier empowerment tools enable efficient innovation across the insurance lifecycle without external dependencies. The solutions enable business, marketing and actuarial teams to manage their product release and business functions. They give them the ability to do their own:
- Rate management
- Product change management
- Bundle of offerings for marketing campaigns
- Release management
Self-service tools increase the capability of internal, non-IT teams, giving them the ability to manage with more flexibility and autonomy. The configuration and self-serve solutions are built with a low-code/no-code engine that supports modern development workflows, including CI/CD. They feature integrated unit and regression testing, and enable carriers to control product updates, and safely release to production. And the tools make it possible for carriers to implement their own data strategy and solutions with Out-Of-The-Box data staging solutions.
The best carrier self-service solutions are built with cutting edge technology.
- Cloud-based applications
- UI built on latest React libraries
- Python for micro services
- Federated module architecture
- Deployed in Kubernetes
Ideally, self-service tools are not just built for the PAS alone. They are fully API driven and will integrate with all other PAS that a carrier operates, plus with front-end and agency management systems, bringing autonomy and efficiency to the insurance ecosystem.
Wrap up #
Choosing a policy administration system that provides carrier autonomy from the vendor is a critical consideration when choosing solutions and partners. A system that has built in self-service and configuration features will enable you to empower both IT and business teams to make changes, test and release new products, rates and bundles themselves.
You’ll gain all the benefits of a SaaS partnership but won’t be tied to expensive and time-consuming vendor interventions ensuring that your organization will be ready to take advantage of new technological developments for years to come.
