Blog Posts Business Management

Understanding the keys to selecting (or not selecting) a modern Life & Annuity PAS Platform

Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog

Why this, why now?

New trends are taking hold in the world of core insurance systems. This article will to help explain these changes and should help insurers to start thinking about what decisions to make for their business. Let’s start by looking at some of the critical disruptions and drivers  which are prompting Life & Annuity (L&A) carriers to evaluate their Policy Administration System (PAS) options:

COVID-19 is amplifying many legacy system, on-premise platform, and paper-based or application-based challenges. It’s putting a spotlight on digital-first, cloud-first, customer self-service, agent self-service, and newer models. Where these capabilities are available, field agents and policyholders challenged with COVID-related, stay-at-home orders will transition into the “new normal” and as a result conduct business more effectively.

So has the time come to replace parts of your legacy systems with a modern policy administration system or suite? Consider a few drivers and trends:

The modern core platform modernization and maturation process has been incredibly slow and unsteady within the industry. The start of the modernization movement in L&A is hard to pin down. Some would argue that Solcorp Ingenium’s portal capabilities or their acquisition of Essentium (ProductXpress) were a turning point. Others might point to the 1991 founding of NaviSys—but is C++ considered modern? Perhaps it was the start of AdminServer in 1998, while others might claim that the real work didn’t start until later.
Regardless, a series of unfortunate events—together with exceptional risk aversion—has slowed industry modernization. Even today, a small fraction (under 20%) of life insurance business runs on a modern platform.
Unfortunate, far-reaching events chilled the industry. Events such as 9/11 in 2001 and the financial crisis, followed by the Great Recession between 2007-2009 were felt through 2011. Then, just when L&A insurers were beginning to make significant investments, COVID-19 turned strategic priorities upside down (though IT budgets seem to be surprisingly resilient as of August 2020).

The result of this slow and shaky modernization is a scarcity of modern system vendors and limited references for those that do exist. Today’s vendor solutions are now maturing with support from leading carriers such as MetLife, Lincoln, and Allstate, who are implementing modern platforms for at least a portion of their insurance products.

These platforms are increasingly an out-of-the-box proposition in which implementation is about configuration and integration—not customization—with a good number of platforms now supporting either individual or group lines, with well-developed templates.

A handful of platforms even support group and individual (most of one and some of the other), while some modern platforms strongly support straight-through processing. These features, together, can support a massive change in IT and operations flexibility.

There’s no simple formula for modernizing a PAS platform. Rather, the carriers that come out ahead will be the ones who carefully consider a number of options.

This blog was co-authored with Chad Hersh. To continue this conversation, connect with me or Chad on social media.

Leave a Comment

Get the BPI Web Feed

Using the HTML code below, you can display this Business Process Incubator page content with the current filter and sorting inside your web site for FREE.

Copy/Paste this code in your website html code:

<iframe src="https://www.businessprocessincubator.com/content/understanding-the-keys-to-selecting-or-not-selecting-a-modern-life-annuity-pas-platform/?feed=html" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" width="100%" height="700">

Customizing your BPI Web Feed

You can click on the Get the BPI Web Feed link on any of our page to create the best possible feed for your site. Here are a few tips to customize your BPI Web Feed.

Customizing the Content Filter
On any page, you can add filter criteria using the MORE FILTERS interface:

Customizing the Content Filter

Customizing the Content Sorting
Clicking on the sorting options will also change the way your BPI Web Feed will be ordered on your site:

Get the BPI Web Feed

Some integration examples

BPMN.org

XPDL.org

×