Let’s be honest: if your core system was a direct report, would you give it a performance bonus, or put it on a PIP? 

Insurance technology can either be your biggest enabler, or your sneakiest saboteur. It’s rarely neutral. 

The thing is, if your company is trying to make strategic bets on growth, efficiency, and improved customer experience, using a tech stack that’s out of date with current technological abilities could be working against you. 

But… before diving down a panic spiral of planning a digital transformation project that’s more about buzzwords than utility and results, know there is a smarter way. 

Using a guide to see exactly where your current tech stack is dragging you down and where it’s rightfully holding its own is an essential first step… which is why we’ve put together these scoresheets for insurers to see what improvements would matter most to them. 

Why a scoresheet instead of a shopping list?

Tech vendors love to rattle off endless feature lists like it’s a game of insurance software bingo. But smart, ambitious insurance isn’t about who can show off the shiniest pieces of technology… it’s about who can deliver the actual outcomes. 

These scoresheets flip the script. 

They’re not about checking if your core system has feature X or integration Y. They’re about whether your tech stack actually gives you the leverage you need to achieve the agility, speed to market, customer loyalty, and operational efficiency that you, your stakeholders, and your customers desire. 

They’re a diagnostic tool that helps you evaluate where your core system stands in six high-impact areas, including: 

• Fast, frictionless, and personalized customer experiences
• Agility to launch new products quickly
• Empowering product developers to innovate without IT intervention
• Engaging with customers whenever & however they choose
• Providing value beyond insurance policy terms & ecosystem readiness
• Worry-free operations & less tech debt

It helps you score yourself in each area based on clearly defined criteria, so you know exactly where you stand. 

A reality check that doesn’t sugar-coat or feamonger

What makes these scoresheets so helpful is their honesty. 

They’re not fearmongering: they don’t assume you’re doomed if you haven’t completely re-platformed to the coolest technology out there. They acknowledge that some core systems are doing just fine for now. 

However, if your core system is lacking somewhere, they will show you. They’ll also help you realize that if you’re too far behind in one particular area, you could end up with expensive, fragile workarounds and a customer experience that’s one typo away from a retention disaster. 

How do they work?

This isn’t just a “rate yourself on a scale from 1-10” exercise. The scoresheets have clear definitions of what each score requires, and a well-structured point system. 

Beyond that, they give you language to talk about transformation with your executives, product teams, and IT in a way that’s grounded and actionable. 

Based on your scoring, you’ll get clarity on:

• What’s working (so you don’t have to bother fixing what isn’t broken)
• What’s weak (so you can stop applying duct tape to legacy problems & craft a smarter strategy)
• What needs to be prioritized (so you don’t get behind in the market and/or don’t get distracted with shiny marketing promises of one technology or another)

Download your copy & give your tech its annual performance review

If you’re not sure if or how your tech stack is sabotaging you — or if you want to know where the most critical points of improvement are ‌ — ‌ you need one of these scoresheets. 

They’ll tell you whether your tech is helping you move faster and smarter, of if it’s quietly holding you back with bloated processes, patchwork fixes, and features that sounded great in 2012. 

Think of it as an annual performance review for your technology:  Honest, unbiased, and will  help you both be more productive in the future. 

Download the scoresheet for your line of business using the buttons below:

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We have. And unfortunately, so have many other insurance customers, brokers, and support staff. Bad portals aren’t just annoying; they’re expensive too (even if they are cheap to make).

Let’s talk about what’s really going on when your digital experience is stuck in the dark ages.

Bad portals are annoying… 

When poorly designed and poorly-integrated user portals are deployed, it doesn’t take long for users to get incredibly frustrated with them. 

• Customers can’t figure out what their coverage includes, so they call your service center.
• Service center staff have to flip through multiple screens on customer info and policy coverages to find the information the customer is requesting. (This can take a long time, especially if the customer has a complex question that requires tracking down multiple pieces of information from different systems.)
• Brokers can’t track down billing issues, policy information, or customer history without opening ten tabs.
• Your claims adjusters are toggling through three systems to do one thing.

Clearly, this is really inefficient. 

Customers who have a bad experience will swear themselves to a different company come renewal time. Brokers will start recommending insurers who have better portals — both for their sake and the sake of their customers.

Then, with enough critical mass of bad user experiences, your TNP score takes a hit, and reputation is damaged in the market by horrible word-of-mouth stories. (Making even the “cheapest” portal solutions really costly in the long run.)

… and expensive. 

Yes, they do get costly. 

Confusing screens without the required information trigger support calls. 

Missing data integrations on the backend take up time doing dull manual work that could be used doing something of higher impact. 

Individual customers will churn, and frustrated brokers will start recommending their books of clientele to other insurers. 

The hidden costs behind incoherent user portals rack up quickly: higher call volume, slower sales cycles, and mounting inefficiencies for IT to deal with. 

Further, modern legacy platforms on the backend only make things worse. They’re not made to support the real-time, data-fluid, instant-answers-at-your-fingertips that customers today expect.

Modern Portals Should be Intelligently Connected & Work for Everyone

The best insurers know portals aren’t just a customer perk. They’re the backbone of the insurance experience. Done right, they make everyone’s lives easier:

• Customers get fast, clean access to what they need.
  
• Brokers feel empowered instead of annoyed.
  
• Internal teams stop playing digital hopscotch with systems that don’t talk to each other.

EIS Portals are designed for this. We build for real personas with real responsibilities, and we don’t stop at making it look pretty. Our portals actually connect to the data and tools your people need. In real time. Seamlessly.

It’s not just a UI upgrade. It’s a better way of doing business.

Here is an EIS portal for claims adjusters showing our fraud prediction model at work. Real-time data integrations continually adjust the fraud score as information comes in regarding the claim, making it easy for claims adjusters to see all the facts in one place.

EIS Portals: Where real-time data meets a seamless experience

EIS Portals plug directly into EIS OneSuite, but they also play well with others, if you use another system for policy or billing information, for example. 

So whether you’re managing a group benefits enrollment or a property & casualty claim, everyone‌ — ‌from the broker to the policyholder to the claims rep‌ — ‌gets the right view, with the right information, at the right time.

EIS Portals let insurers build personalized, seamless experiences for everyone across the insurance value chain. They’re configurable, persona-based interfaces that connect directly with EIS OneSuite, meaning users get what they need, when they need it. 

This results in fewer frustrations, faster service, and a boost in customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Because let’s be real: your digital experience is your brand. If your portals are difficult, your customers don’t know why they’re difficult; they just leave and look for something easier.

If you’re ready to stop losing time, money, and customers to clunky experiences, see what EIS Portals can do for you.

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Pacific Life and Wellfleet both launched new group benefits businesses as greenfield projects, from the ground up. 

They both wanted to be truly innovative, and didn’t want tech debt or baggage from a legacy tech stack holding them down. Instead, they moved with agility from the traditional insurance products they historically offered, and started with a blank slate and a mandate to build something new, fresh, and modern for the group benefits space.

In this Q&A hosted by LIMRA and EIS, leaders from both carriers shared what it really takes to stand up a greenfield operation in today’s insurance environment, and why the decisions they made early on — especially around core technology — are paying off for them now.

Wellfleet: Fast Execution with Clear Intent

As a Berkshire Hathaway company with deep experience in health and accident plan administration, Wellfleet entered the employee benefits space with a clear point of view: if they couldn’t offer a better experience for employers and employees, there was no point in entering at all.

That meant building a fully digital, omnichannel platform to support quote-to-claim workflows across four key products. They called it Lighthouse. With a small, agile team and a cloud-native, API-driven core platform, they launched in just 11 months — issuing their first coverage for a January 1 effective date.

In the full Q&A, Wellfleet discusses: 

• Why they chose to prioritize a digital, omnichannel quote-to-claim workflow from day one
• How they launched Lighthouse — their group benefits platform — in just 11 months
• The critical role of a cloud-native, API-first architecture in enabling agility and integration
• How a lean team successfully supported four initial products at launch: accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity, and short-term disability
  How digital-first design helped create a more intuitive experience for brokers, employers, and employees
• Their approach to enrollment data, platform flexibility, and real-time quoting

Pacific Life: Designing for Brokers, Employers, and Employees

Pacific Life also didn’t want to try to adapt old systems for a new business model. As a legacy insurer in the life insurance space, they started clean, with a customer-first approach designed specifically for group benefits.

This meant building event-driven architecture, enabling automation where it saves manual effort, and reserving human interaction for where it matters most. From enrollment to billing to claims, the platform supports real-time collaboration across all users, with flexibility baked in to meet the needs of different client types.

In the full Q&A, Pacific Life discusses: 

• How they approached enrollment as a core driver of experience and efficiency
• Why they embraced event-driven architecture and automation (and where they chose not to automate)
• The importance of balancing digital tools with human empathy in claims and service interactions
  How they handled broker expectations around tech capabilities and platform transparency
  Real-world lessons from billing challenges — and how flexibility made the difference
• What it takes to maintain confidence in a new platform as adoption grows

Why the Full Q&A Is Worth Your Time

This Q&A isn’t a case of two carriers just tweaking what already existed — or going to the opposite end of the spectrum and deploying a full-on rip & replace transformation. 

These are greenfield builds designed by smart, ambitious insurers to compete in a modern, high-expectation market. Both companies are open about what worked, what was harder than expected, and what they’d recommend to others.

If you’re building something new, or thinking about how to set your next line of business up for success, their insight is refreshingly direct and useful.

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Why Traditional Customer-Centric Data Strategies Fail

Most insurers are sitting on mountains of customer data, so lack of data isn’t the issue. 

The problem is that their data is:

• Siloed across different policy admin and CRM systems
• Outdated or incomplete due to manual processes
• Difficult to integrate across digital and traditional touchpoints

These limitations make personalization, proactive customer service, and efficient operations nearly impossible.

EIS CustomerCore: The End of Disjointed Data

However, with EIS CustomerCore™, insurers can finally turn fragmented customer information into a seamless, real-time, 360-degree view of every policyholder. It’s the backbone of smarter decision-making, deeper engagement, and operational efficiency that doesn’t just match today’s expectations but sets a new standard for the industry.

Think of it as the central nervous system for your customer intelligence. It helps insurers who use it:

• Centralize customer data from multiple (internal and external) sources into one, unified system
• Enrich and optimize customer information in real time for accurate, actionable insights
• Integrate customer data seamlessly with policy, billing, claims, and CRM systems
• Can provide hyper-personalization at scale, helping engaging with their customers like never before

How does CustomerCore do this?

CustomerCore doesn’t just collect data‌. As a part of EIS OneSuite™, it orchestrates customer data across the whole insurance lifecycle to give insurers a living, breathing view of every customer, and to increase customer satisfaction at every touchpoint. Here’s how it works:

• Real-Time Data Integration: CustomerCore ingests and unifies data from policy, billing, claims, CRM, and external sources, ensuring no data lives in a vacuum.
• Event-Driven Architecture: Because EIS OneSuite has an event-driven architecture, certain updates in CustomerCore can trigger workflows elsewhere across the insurance lifecycle, enriching the customer experience, making insurance less annoying to interact with, and helping the insurer keep cleaner data records.
• Seamless Ecosystem Connectivity: With open APIs and pre-built integrations, CustomerCore syncs effortlessly with existing digital tools and touchpoints, from self-service portals to call center platforms.

Together, these capabilities don’t just provide a better data‌ set — ‌they unlock smarter decisions, more personalized experiences, and faster responses to every customer need.

Your Unified Customer Data Strategy Starts Now

If you’re tired of wrestling with outdated customer management systems and data silos, EIS could be right for you. We’ve been the go-to foundation for many ambitious insurers trying to improve operational efficiency and increase customer satisfaction.

To get the full breakdown of how it all works, download our comprehensive guide, Unifying Customer Data with CustomerCore.

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But it’s a quiet powerhouse that can make or break employee satisfaction, HR efficiency, and compliance success. 

The AbsenceSoft 2025 State of Leave and Accommodations Report makes one thing abundantly clear: leave management isn’t just an HR headache anymore‌ — ‌it’s an operational battleground where insurers can either thrive or fall behind.

(Spoiler alert: If your leave management systems still run on manual processes, you’re losing. Big time.)

Here’s what the numbers say — and what insurers can do to fix the cracks in their absence operations before they become chasms.

Leave Requests Are Piling Up‌ — ‌And HR Is Drowning

According to the report, 57% of organizations reported an increase in leave requests over the past year. Of those, a staggering 53% saw requests climb by more than 21%. 

Add to that an equally sharp increase in accommodations requests, and HR teams are busier than ever. Unfortunately, many are still relying on outdated manual processes that can barely keep up.

For insurers, this is a critical red flag. Manual processes mean:

• Longer approval times: Nothing says “frustration” like an employee waiting weeks for their leave request to be processed.
• Higher error rates: Compliance mistakes in leave policies are lawsuits waiting to happen.
• Overworked HR teams: With the higher leave and accommodation requests, HR teams have a lot on their plate, and are starting to burn out from the overload of manual work involved.

Employee Leave Frustrations Can Be Expensive (Really Expensive)

Employees who feel unsupported during their leave process are more likely to jump ship. When they do, it costs companies 33–50% of an employee’s annual salary to replace them.

Let’s do some math:

• A company with 5,000 employees and a 10% turnover rate loses 500 employees annually.
• If inefficient leave management contributes to just 5% of that turnover, that’s 25 employees leaving unnecessarily.
• At an average replacement cost of $20,000 per employee, that employer is looking at half a million dollars down the drain every year.

And that’s before factoring in the hidden costs: lower morale, lost institutional knowledge, and the damage to your reputation as an employer of choice.

Compliance Nightmares Lurking in the Shadows

Federal, state, and local leave policies are getting more complex by the year, and manual systems simply can’t keep up. From parental leave to caregiver benefits, employers are adding new types of leave at a record pace, but those shiny new benefits mean nothing if they’re not applied correctly.

And as an insurer responsible for payouts to cover certain types of leave, you could face non-compliance fines, reputational damage, and a loss of trust with policyholders if you and their HR departments don’t have your house in order. 

By helping HR departments make sure they’re filing leaves correctly — and that their employees have the right expectations around leave types and insurance payouts — you can save yourself from all kinds of compliance issues and customer experience headaches.

How Group Benefits Insurers Can Turn Leave Chaos into Leave Confidence

Here’s the good news: fixing leave management isn’t rocket science. It’s just a matter of upgrading your tech stack to handle the complexity.

At EIS, we’ve cracked the code with our Absence Management enhancement in partnership with AbsenceSoft that integrates seamlessly into EIS OneSuite™. Here’s how we can help:

• End-to-End Automation & Real-Time Data Syncing: From leave requests to compliance checks, we eliminate manual workflows and reduce the risk of errors.
• Compliance Tracking: Stay on top of federal, state, and local regulations without breaking a sweat.
• Unified Portals: Give employees, HR teams, and insurers a single platform to manage the entire leave process, from request to payout.

The result? HR teams get their time (and sanity) back, employees feel valued and supported, and insurers improve retention while reducing compliance risks. Everybody wins.

A Smarter Future for Leave Management

The 2025 report paints a clear picture: the days of cobbling together leave policies with duct tape and hope are over. Insurers that invest in smarter, integrated solutions won’t just save time and money‌ — ‌they’ll also position themselves as champions of the employee experience.

Interested in improving your leave management processes? Discover how EIS can improve operational efficiency, support your employees, and give your company a competitive edge.

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This event wasn’t just a challenge‌ — ‌it was a celebration of creativity, teamwork, and the endless possibilities of AI-driven insurance solutions. With 26 teams, over 135 participants, and groundbreaking projects, we turned ideas into actionable developments. 

The Backstory: A Journey Fueled by Passion for Insurance Technology

The hackathon emerged from a mix of necessity and opportunity. 

With survey feedback highlighting innovation gaps, AWS partnered with us, offering immersive AI workshops to ignite our team’s creativity. Over 300 employees voluntarily attended these sessions, gaining a crash course in cutting-edge AI technology.

From ideation to execution, the hackathon showcased collaboration at its finest. Participants worked across time zones, forming dynamic teams, submitting 26 projects, and blowing our judges out of the water.

The Judging Framework: A Fair, Rigorous Process

The projects submitted from the hackathon were just judged‌ through a multifaceted lens:

• Complexity: How challenging was the problem tackled?
• Innovation: Did the idea push the boundaries of what’s possible?
• Presentation: Was the business value of the project clear and beneficial?
• Execution: How complete and functional was the project?
• EIS Technical Fit: How well did it align with our technology ecosystem?

Judges included our CEO, Alec Miloslavsky, our CTO, Mike Dwyer, and SVPs from heads of our product teams. 

The Winners Circle: Game-Changing AI Innovations for Insurers

It was a hard choice, but ultimately three projects won:

• 🥇 First Place: Dream Team — Smart Quote Generator 
  • This tool generates competitive quotes by extracting insights from competitor policy documents. This innovative solution demonstrates the power of AI in streamlining the quoting process and improving competitiveness.
• 🥈 Second Place: Panda Team — AI Demand Management Optimization Tool for Business Analysts 
  • This tool empowers business analysts with AI-driven analysis, generating INVEST-compliant user stories to streamline demand management.
• 🥉 Third Place: Billing Olympus — BillBrain AI Co-Pilot 
  • A smart assistant that revolutionizes the billing setup process with natural, chat-based interactions.

Best in Category Winners: Innovation Across the Board

Because the projects delivered were so impressive, our judges decided to also award best in category along with the top three:

• SaaS: An AI assistant to validate test environments, recommend further analysis when needed, and assess deployment states post-regression, performance, or batch testing.
• Business Impact:This project aims to develop an AI-driven solution that autonomously adjusts insurance rate factors, using a chatbot to analyze data and update factors in OpenL.
• Ready to Use: An AI-driven tool that provides contextual UI guidance and tips based on user profiles, enhancing learning, onboarding, and product knowledge with document and wiki integration.
• Developer Tooling: A chatbot using NLP and semantic search to simplify API discovery, enabling users to ask plain-language questions and receive precise, relevant documentation.

Beyond the Hackathon: What’s Next?

The event wasn’t just a one-off celebration. It was a springboard for integrating AI-driven solutions into EIS OneOneSuite. Under the guidance of Stephen Price, our new AI architect, these ideas are being evaluated for potential implementation into our roadmap, giving a brighter, more innovative future for our technology and our customers.

A Final Word

The 2024 EIS Hackathon was more than a competition‌ — ‌it was a testament to what happens when you dedicate the power of smart minds to figure out the best way to harness new technologies. (In this case, AI.) With AWS’s support, our team’s dedication, and a company-wide culture of ambition, we’re redefining the possibilities of insurance technology. 

Ready to see what comes next? Stay tuned!

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Their vision? Build a benefits platform that prioritizes seamless, digital-first experiences for employers and employees alike. And they turned to EIS to bring this vision to life.

Read the case study

The Challenge: A New Playing Field

Voluntary benefits insurance is a vastly different game from traditional group health coverage. For example, in the area of claims handling, speed, accuracy, and customer communication are critical to building trust and loyalty.

Success depends not only on pleasing brokers and employers but also on engaging directly with consumers. Wellfleet knew it needed a strategy‌ — ‌and technology‌ — ‌to juggle these competing priorities.

They knew legacy systems weren’t going to cut it. They wanted a foundation that could integrate effortlessly with enrollment platforms, eliminate data silos, and power a user-friendly quote-to-claim workflow — a critical factor for customer satisfaction in voluntary benefits.

Why Wellfleet Chose EIS 

Wellfleet partnered with EIS to build “Lighthouse,” a custom benefits administration platform designed to redefine voluntary benefits experiences. With EIS OneOneSuite™, they gained access to:

• Limitless integration capabilities: Lighthouse seamlessly connects with third-party systems for unmatched data fluidity.
• Operational efficiency: Streamlined claims and enrollment processes empower Wellfleet’s team to serve clients better and faster.
• A customer-centric approach: By focusing on the user experience, Wellfleet turned an operational necessity into a competitive differentiator.

Customer-Centric Results That Speak for Themselves

Since implementing EIS, Wellfleet has revolutionized its claims process, achieving an average turnaround time of just one day. 

This speed and efficiency have made their claims handling one of the most customer-friendly in the industry.

As Erik Gray, Wellfleet’s Digital Integrations Practice Leader, put it:

“EIS helped us stay true to our mission of delivering customer-centric insurance solutions. This partnership enables us to provide superior support, setting us apart in the market.”

By choosing EIS, Wellfleet didn’t just transform their operations‌ — ‌they reshaped how customers interact with and perceive their insurance provider.

The Takeaway for Ambitious Insurers

What Wellfleet accomplished isn’t just a case study — it’s a blueprint for insurers ready to embrace modern technology architecture to meet customers and employers where they’re at, and subsequently establish themselves as the go-to insurer in their respective markets.

With EIS, the possibilities are endless: faster claims, happier customers, and a coretech platform that evolves as you do.

Let’s talk about how EIS can help you make it happen. Contact us today.

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Insurance isn’t just adapting‌ — ‌it’s transforming. In 2025, an industry known for steady, cautious evolution will take giant leaps, embracing innovative technology, responding to market shifts, and reshaping the customer experience.

At EIS, we’ve identified the trends that will define the year ahead, from the rise of embedded insurance to the adaptation of artificial intelligence and beyond. These aren’t just trends‌ — ‌they’re imperatives for insurers looking to lead, not lag, in a rapidly shifting landscape.

Trend 1: Winning at Distribution with Digital Ecosystems

The days of relying on traditional channels like brokers and agents alone are over. With $3 trillion in potential market value, embedded insurance and self-service portals are reshaping distribution. But this isn’t about replacing human touchpoints; it’s about empowering them. Carriers that embrace omnichannel ecosystems will ensure seamless transitions between digital tools and personal interactions, driving customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Trend 2: AI Tightrope‌ — ‌Balancing Ambition and Governance

From fraud detection to personalized product recommendations, artificial intelligence will be a cornerstone of 2025 strategies. Yet, insurers must tread carefully. AI’s promise depends on responsible practices and accurate, real-time data foundations. Success stories like a leading insurer using generative AI for personalized call-center interactions in 2024 show the potential‌ — ‌but without proper oversight, the risks loom large.

Trend 3: Compliance as an Opportunity

Regulations like the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) may seem daunting, but they offer opportunities to build customer trust and drive innovation. Carriers leveraging adaptive core systems can respond quickly to compliance changes, turning mandates into opportunties to stand out to their customer base by protecting data and improving customer communications.

Trend 4: Facing Down Environmental Risks

As extreme weather intensifies, insurers must evolve their approach to risk. Instead of pulling out of high-risk markets, carriers can invest in predictive technology and prevention tools‌ — like sending out property protection alerts on upcoming storms and bundling water-level sensors with policies‌ — ‌to protect customers and offset claims.

Trend 5: Life Insurance Gets a Breath of Fresh Air

With millennials and Gen Z driving the workforce, life insurance needs a makeover. These tech-savvy generations prioritize income protection over traditional products, and life insurers are seeing their market penetration decrease. Carriers embracing modular platforms can integrate life insurance into digital touchpoints and create offers tailored to younger customers’ needs and preferences.

To Shine in 2025, You Need to be Agile

These trends share one undeniable truth: the need for agility. 

Whether it’s modernizing distribution, leveraging AI, or adapting to new regulations, success in 2025 depends on embracing agile, ready-to-adapt technology that drives customer-centricity and operational efficiency.

Curious to learn more? 

Dive deeper into these insights in our whitepaper, “EIS 2025 Outlook: Trends That Will Shape Insurance.” It’ll help you pinpoint where you can work to thrive in one of insurance’s most transformative years to date.

EIS is empowering insurers to take the leap into the future with modular, cloud-native solutions built for ambition. Ready to redefine your potential? Visit us at eisgroup.com.

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However, when the policy is placed above the customer (whether in business priorities or in technology structure), things can start to go awry… The problem is when carriers prioritize maximizing policy sales and driving down operating costs above all or most other issues. When this happens, customer service almost always gets put on the back burner. 

In contrast, being customer-centric is about maximizing the value of the customer by perfecting their experience. Basic examples include making it easier for policyholders to file claims or providing intuitive user interfaces through mobile insurance apps.

Though it’s not the be-all-end-all of the philosophy, an insurer’s tech setup plays a big role in customer-centricity. 

The legacy and modern legacy core systems many insurers have used for so long are fine for policy-centric models, but they’re not great at empowering true customer centricity. 

In this post, we’ll look at key reasons why policy-centricity is a disservice to your existing market (and future target audiences) and how you can change course with customer-centric coretech.

1. Out of Touch With the Times

When modern legacy core systems for insurance first hit the market about 25 years ago, they made sense for where the industry was at the time. They’d been built to support more efficient (and profitable) policy sales and administration, and that’s what carriers thought would maximize their success. 

Though this issue existed across all insurance lines, traditional group benefits operations are a particularly good example: Policies were sold with a focus on the group rather than individual members, so technology platforms maximized the efficiency of that model.

Customers, meanwhile, had no reason to shop for (or enroll in) policies by doing anything other than comparing premium rates and coverage options. 

Now, industries including retail, banking, and streaming entertainment offer personalized experiences. Customers expect the same from insurers, and are demanding it from carriers. They want policy-buying and adjustment tailored to their specific needs, web- or mobile-based claim filing and tracking, multiple digital payment options, easy personal data management, and more. (Going back to group insurance for a moment, members want to easily enroll in the group plan most suitable for them while choosing specific direct-to-consumer voluntary benefits — experiencing no hiccups or glitches in the process.)

Legacy core systems can’t easily support any of these options. The effort required to add such functions to an outdated core — i.e., a lot of IT work that’s intricate and time-consuming — is so resource-inefficient that it may invalidate the gains it’d otherwise help insurers achieve. Even if ‌intelligent third-party point solutions integrate successfully, which isn’t guaranteed, problems with data exchange will impact performance and damage the customer experience.

This problem only gets solved with an upgrade to coretech capable of supporting the fluid, real-time customer data processing that’s necessary to power more personalized and intuitive experiences for policyholders.

2. Siloed, Disconnected Customer Data

When insurers stick to a policy-centric business model and the modern legacy technology that’s underneath it, data is often spread out across multiple databases and systems. This siloing separates customer data by function (policy admin, claims, billing) and also frequently means redundancies within the silos — e.g., a P&C customer with auto, home, and liability coverage having three different policy records.

To say nothing of the complications this creates for insurance business users, customers can go through nightmares trying to find a simple detail about their coverage. If they dial into their carrier’s call center or visit the customer-facing web portal, the presence of redundant data means it could be time-consuming and frustrating to find the right record for the right policy. Siloed and redundant data also means there’s a bigger risk of inaccuracies, and that can cause any number of problems down the line: delayed claims processing, overbilling, coverage gaps, and more.

With a core platform like EIS OneSuite™, this sprawl doesn’t happen. Customer profiles in CustomerCore™ give carriers a unified view of all policies, claims, bills, and other relevant interaction records across their entire history with the insurer.

3. Price-Led = Trouble-Bound

Because the policy-centric model is all about maximizing sales and reducing costs, it’s historically common for insurers that follow this approach to focus strongly on competitive pricing. As with other aspects of policy-centrism, you could make a reasonable argument in favor of a price-led model a couple of decades ago … but it makes much less sense now.

Why? Above all, it’s because quality customer experience has become a proven value generator for insurance in recent years, based on research by McKinsey. Someone choosing between two home policies won’t pick the cheaper one by default. If the pricier option comes with value-add features that simplify and streamline their insurance experience, they’re likely willing to pay a bit more than what they originally budgeted.

Meanwhile, if customers realize their current carrier can’t offer robust CX and ease of use — which isn’t possible with outdated core systems — they’ll start looking elsewhere for an insurer that can, even if this means spending more. Soon enough, carriers bound by legacy tech will start feeling the pain in their bottom line to a degree they can’t ignore.

Ready to Cure Policy-Centric Tunnel Vision?

Committing to a customer-centric direction — and the coretech that can support it  — is an investment of both time and resources. But it’s also an investment in future-proofing your operations, by maximizing the value of every customer and building a foundation for their loyalty. Modern legacy core system vendors, meanwhile, will keep you stuck in the policy-centric past.

To learn more and see how we compare to competitors in the space like Guidewire, Majesco, Duck Creek, and others, read our complete guide: “EIS vs. the Competition.”

The post 3 Reasons Why Being Policy-Centric is a Customer Disservice appeared first on EIS.

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After all, if it technically works… why go through the headache?

But while it might not seem like a core overhaul is urgent on the surface, looking under the hood (and at what can’t be done because of technical limitations) tells a different story. 

Major operational inefficiencies boost resource usage and total cost of ownership (TCO), and they’ll only become more problematic with time.

Here are some of the biggest inefficiencies caused by outdated core systems — and how EIS OneSuite™ can help insurers streamline operations for business users, satisfy customers, and boost the bottom line.

1. System Patchworks = Disorganization and Confusion

With legacy or modern legacy core systems, one main issue is that insurers can’t manage everything from a single, central hub. Instead, they’ve got a patchwork of multiple solutions and databases — both internal and external — adding up to a chaotic whole.

Because legacy core architecture wasn’t built with modern integration in mind, the disconnected systems and the core can’t easily communicate with each other. 

Because of this, data gets stuck in silos, and teams can’t freely access what they need without doing intensive detective work for thing like policy coverage limits to properly process claims, billing status, and so on.

By contrast, EIS OneSuite is built with open architecture and robust APIs. These allow seamless integration and real-time data exchange between internal systems, third-party solutions, and partner platforms. The resulting data fluidity ensures that carriers’ various business units and trusted partners stay on the same page, and that customer service can be truly personalized and real-time.

2. A Clunky Claims Lifecycle

Consider this example of legacy limitations: A big-name insurer runs on an outdated coure system that makes claims very complicated. Because of the setup, claims processing requires eight people running eight systems (each with extremely out-of-date UI) just to get a claim in the system for evaluation. 

Most of that work doesn’t add any real value to the insurer, and just increases cost of operations. Plus, if claims can’t quickly get where they need to go, they won’t get paid on the timelines customers expect. This leaves policyholders frustrated — and wondering if they should switch insurers.

EIS OneSuite products like ClaimCore® and ClaimSmart™ supercharge claims efficiency: Digital, automated FNOL ensures claims are immediately directed to the right examiners, or expedited for quick resolution if they’re routine. Also, preconfigured workflows eliminate manual tasks (like setting up auto rentals or appointments with property restorers) to reduce claims team workloads.

3. Bogged-Down Billing

Legacy and modern legacy tech doesn’t give billing agents convenient access to the info they need because of inefficient architecture and poor integration. For example, if a customer’s bill has to be modified due to policy changes, the employee managing the account won’t be alerted to this for hours or maybe even a day. 

In general, they’re stuck relying on too many paper documents and “digitized” but not automated manual processes. Premiums and broker commissions will process more slowly than they should. This means customers who are paid up and brokers who want what they’re owed might either appear as behind on payments or properly compensated when that isn’t true. It’s frustrating for everyone.

BillingCore® by EIS is closely integrated with all EIS OneSuite modules and other relevant internal or external systems. This ensures real-time availability of accurate data and minimizes error risk across the billing lifecycle. BillingCore also supports a wide variety of billing modes and payment methods, lets billing agents customize invoicing processes, comprehensively documents all transactions, and allows self-service reconciliation.

4. Change is Complicated

Carriers may try to avoid a core system overhaul by installing operation-specific point solutions inside their current, outdated core system. 

Unfortunately, this band-aid approach is dicey, as it requires ‌delicate, hard-coded integration. That’s resource-intensive and expensive, especially if this becomes a go-to “workaround.” Also, there’s no guarantee these new applications will perform effectively, as they were designed for more advanced operating environments than what older core systems can provide.

EIS coretech avoids this problem. The platform’s open architecture gives you the freedom to easily adopt innovative new tools. Also, EIS OneSuite is scalable and flexible because it’s cloud-based, so your core system stays updated, evolving in tandem with the organization and market-wide technological advancements.

Ready for Efficiency-Empowering Coretech?

We’ve discussed just one facet of the problems that legacy core systems cause — and one dimension of why EIS OneSuite is the future-proof coretech solution for ambitious insurers. 

To learn more and see how we compare to competitors in the space like Guidewire, Majesco, Duck Creek and others, read our complete guide: “EIS vs. the Competition.”

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Any insurer hoping to succeed in this rapidly evolving industry needs a digital-first core system that can handle current challenges and is flexible enough to adapt smoothly to future developments. 

Legacy and modern legacy core systems haven’t met those criteria for quite a while, but insurers can’t just jump into a core transformation without doing their due diligence. (Nor should they.)

The whole leadership team — particularly the CEO and CIO — should be on the same page, and there are some key questions to ask to get there. 

Below are four discussion points to help establish a clear path forward for impactful, future-proof tech updates.

1. How Ready Are We to Make Changes?

If an insurer is seriously considering a core transformation, they’re aware at least some of their technology is behind the curve. But how much?

To get an idea, ask this question: How much of a barrier to progress are your existing core systems? 

Beyond telling you “yes, we need to upgrade,” your CIO will be able to explain what about your core system needs to be different to make your desired progress.

Then, think of your core system like an aging building: Will a “facelift” solve your problems, meaning you can retain some systems or components, or do you need a “gut” — a complete overhaul? Or is it something in between?

Your CIO will be able to outline how easy (or difficult) it’d be to upgrade your core. For a “facelift” to work, the system you’re on should support continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD). If it doesn’t, and upgrading requires major effort from IT (with resources/budget to match), gutting the old core will be better in the long run.

2. What’s Your Team Working On to Improve the Customer Experience and Grow Revenue?

Tech updates that lower costs and boost operational efficiency are always a good thing. But they can’t be the only thing. CIOs must make room for customer experience improvements in any core transformation plan. 

As just a few examples, this could mean creating more intuitive customer portals, adding intelligent automation to streamline claim intake, or improving customer data management for more personalized marketing. Updates like these hit the sweet spot of making things easier for customers while creating opportunities to generate revenue (through upsells, cross-sells, etc.) The CIO should look for a coretech solution that covers all those bases (and more).

3. What Can We Do To Get More Value From Our Data?

The importance of maximizing insurance data’s value in all possible ways can’t be overstated. For example, unfettered, real-time access to historical customer data helps adjusters make better decisions about complex claims. It also ensures policy admin teams don’t have to pore over old paper records to determine which rate factors should carry the most weight when pricing a policy.

Streamlining the flow of data needs to be at the forefront of any CIO’s mind when coretech upgrade conversations start.

CIOs should strive for 100% data fluidity — so it’s freely accessible whenever needed and accurate in real or near-real time. Cloud-native technology can make this happen across multiple channels, including mobile, while modern legacy systems can’t do this without complicated, resource-intensive integrations.

4. How Easily Can We Connect with Partners?

Because modern insurance customers expect more out of their carriers, being able to integrate with business and data partners is essential. Doing so with seamless integrations will allow you to:

Broaden your product catalog (think specialized coverage, on-demand, or usage-based insurance)
Expand your distribution (think digitally embedding policies at a business partner’s point of sale)
Connect to key data sources (like public data sources to stay up-to-date on customers’ life changes)

Legacy core systems can’t support these partner integrations for the same reason they can’t enable true data fluidity: they don’t have API-first architectures that enable quick, “plug-and-play” integrations. Creating these connections requires coretech that uses open APIs, and that’s what CIOs must look for.

Ready to Plot a Course For Digital Transformation?

EIS OneSuite™ is the future-enabling core platform that can help your CIO answer all these questions effectively. 

But these aren’t the only areas your tech team must address. See more questions and discussion points in our comprehensive guide: 10 Questions Every Insurance CEO Should Ask Their CIO About Tech Operations.

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Which sounds great, right? 

Unfortunately, the adoption of technologies to improve claims — the most customer-facing part of insurance — doesn’t quite match the level of interest carriers have expressed about going digital. 

The reason?

The LIMRA report cited difficulties with legacy core systems as one of the key roadblocks to further innovation. Old core systems caused reporting challenges for 66% of survey respondents. Other challenges included unconnected internal platforms, a lack of fluidity between systems for customer data, and poor API compatibility. (Legacy systems are now ghosts of their former selves, but the trouble they cause juuuuust won’t go away.)

In this post, we’ll see how two leading benefits insurers are using event-driven architecture in their core platforms to manage complex workplace benefits claims — making life easier for member, customer, and carrier alike. (*cough* We’ll see how they saw remarkable success through their no-holds-barred embrace of digital transformation and innovative coretech from EIS. *cough*)

Streamlining Claims With Event-Based Processing

Consider how many workplace group members have multiple coverages beyond their health insurance. This is a good thing: Today’s employees want a wide range of benefit options so they can personalize insurance based on their life’s needs. But if employers provide this coverage via multiple carriers, employees often have a convoluted nightmare on their hands just getting in touch with each insurer handling each policy. 

Even if one carrier provides all or most benefits, it can still be hard for customers to navigate the processes necessary to file claims for an incident (say, a bone break) that applies to multiple coverage types (hospital indemnity, short-term disability insurance, and more, depending on policy terms). It’s guaranteed to be hard if the insurer uses a legacy or modern legacy core system that doesn’t have event-driven architecture.

Monolithic Architecture = Horrific Claims-Filing

Older core systems’ monolithic architectures often mean data for different types of coverage is siloed in a policy-centric setup, rather than being directly tied to employees’ member profiles through airtight data integration. Legacy systems also don’t process data in real time (because they can’t). 

This slows down claims processing for an employee with just one coverage type. But when multiple benefits and claims are involved, it’s sluggish enough to be excruciating. That’s bound to frustrate anyone, especially in the fraught times after an injury or serious illness. If situations like this become common enough and generate significant complaints, it’ll frustrate employers. Then they might start thinking about taking their business elsewhere the next time renewal comes around.

One Case = Multiple Coverages; Only One Claim (No More Scary Claims Situations)

With event-based claims handling, a claim becomes a case — it encompasses every employee benefit a person has that applies to a given incident. 

The moment the affected individual files their initial claim for one insurance type, it triggers filings for all other relevant protection. 

For example, a short-term disability claim and FMLA filing will automatically be filed after a primary health insurance or accident claim stemming from a broken leg, if a broken leg affects the employee’s job. The employee doesn’t have to file more than once or make an endless string of phone calls. Meanwhile, the employer and insurer have a centralized, real-time view of everything that’s going on with the employee’s case, so they’re never caught off-guard no matter how complex the issue becomes.

Event-Driven Claims Success Stories From Two Ambitious Insurers

In an August webinar hosted by LIMRA, two EIS customers — Wellfleet Insurance Company and Pacific Life — discussed our coretech’s benefits, including the advantages of event-based claims.

Wellfleet’s EIS-powered benefits administration platform, Lighthouse, enables them to customize plans and product development, make quick updates, and keep the user experience consistent across multiple distribution channels. It also galvanizes the insurer’s claims processing.

Erik Gray, Wellfleet’s Head of Enrollment Experience, explained Lighthouse’s claims effectiveness through a hypothetical example of an employee with a broken arm:

“With a claims system that has event-driven architecture, all the information for that employee is all in one place,” Gray said. “Say that we received their initial accident claim but then notice they have additional coverage with us, like hospital indemnity, and they spent time in the hospital. We handle that as a single workflow and handle the processing, assessment, and payout as one claims case. We don’t have to send them a reminder about their other coverage, and we will make payment for any other applicable coverages the member has available.”

Similarly, Pacific Life’s digitally native setup enabled innovation at breakneck speed, accelerating product development cycles and improving enrollment onboarding through full digitization. According to SVP and Head of Employee Benefits Division Erich Sternberg, their platform also allowed them to create a truly customer-centric claims experience for group members:

“We designed the claims interface intuitively, so based on the answers to a few questions from the claimant, we’ll know they had an accident, went to the hospital, missed work, and so on,” Sternberg said. “From there, we can manage the whole process in one streamlined fashion, so the customer doesn’t need to make multiple phone calls and go through multiple interactions.”

How EIS Makes it Happen

Because EIS coretech enables the sort of seamless integration and data fluidity that’s impossible with outdated legacy systems, the claims lifecycle can be an efficient, end-to-end workflow. The employee group members are the main “records” around which everything revolves, rather than the policies associated with their benefits.

With CustomerCore™ (the heart of EIS OneSuite, alongside EIS Platform), carriers have a unified, comprehensive view of each employer-customer that covers every single interaction across the life of the client, including the cases of specific employees. Also, if the employer has medical coverage from a different carrier, the benefits carrier can connect with that insurer (provided there’s approval from all parties involved) using the open APIs that come with EIS OneSuite. This means the event-based automated claims workflow still functions even when one carrier doesn’t provide all coverage, because the benefits insurer gets alerted when a medical claim is filed.

Ready to Streamline Claims and Satisfy More Customers?

Improving and simplifying the claims experience is one of the best ways workplace benefits insurers can pursue the goal of increased customer satisfaction. EIS OneSuite gives carriers the architectural foundation necessary to make claims processing as painless as possible.

To learn more about event-based claims (and EIS in general) from two of our most digitally forward customers, check out the full LIMRA webinar. 

When you’re ready, book a call to talk to an EIS representative to start planning how our event-driven core system can revolutionize your claims processes for the better.

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APIs (application program interfaces) and EDIs (electronic data interchanges) both enable data transfer that lets insurers take an ecosystem approach to their business, but the similarities basically end there. 

So… which one works better for insurers? Looking at them each closely quickly highlights their major differences, and you’ll soon see that one is decidedly better than the other.

EDIs = The Past. APIs = Now (and Beyond)

First, let’s run through EDIs:

An EDI is essentially a conduit that facilitates the transfer of data between two organizations (e.g., an auto manufacturer sending parts orders to its many component suppliers).
The technology dates back to the late 1960s/early 1970s, and hasn’t changed much since then.
Systems connected by EDIs typically use a uniform file format like EDIFACT, X12, or VDA, and communicate using VAN, AS2, or FTP protocols.
EDI data exchanges use batch processing, so they take place at set intervals (and can’t be triggered outside this schedule).
In addition to manufacturing, the industries that use EDIs most often include retailers, logistics, and various segments of healthcare (for example, communications between medical organizations and Medicare).

Now, APIs:

An API is a set of rules or protocols, written in code, that allows two different software applications or systems to communicate. For example, a customer’s mobile e-commerce app and an e-retailer’s database are two systems an API would connect. 
The earliest APIs date back to the late 1970s, but modern APIs — particularly representational state transfer (REST) APIs and other web APIs — appeared in the early 2000s. Ever since, they’ve been in consistent use, and are now more versatile than ever.
Unlike EDIs, APIs can be used with many different programming languages and platforms. This is due in no small part to their use of versatile file formats, most notably XML and JSON.
API data exchange occurs in real time, over common internet protocols (like HTTP and HTTPS).
Because of APIs’ flexibility, virtually all modern software uses them to communicate with other apps, databases, and backend systems.

EDIs are by no means useless — especially not in logistics or manufacturing, which commonly make standardized large-scale data transfers. The issue is that they’re not useful for other industries, especially not insurance. 

EDIs require highly specialized knowledge to set up and manage, and they’re costly to maintain. In contrast, a significant number of today’s developers can put together APIs from scratch (or with the help of easy-to-find, open-source API libraries), and do so quickly.  APIs also often come with built-in workflows and automation to simplify development and deployment, which just isn’t possible with EDIs.

Above all, what it comes down to is speed: How fast do you want your data transferred and available? (And how quickly do you want to start making those quick data transfers happen?)

Real-Time Data: The Key to Better User and Customer Experiences (and Why We Love APIs for Group Benefits Insurers)

In insurance, having real-time data available is more valuable than ever before. 

Customers (and end-users, in the case of group benefits) need the freedom to look up policy details and track the progress of claims.
Brokers require fully up-to-date commission and billing data to oversee their policies of record properly. They also have to keep a close eye on member sign-ups during open enrollment cycles to assist their employer-clients.
Adjusters, policy administrators, and other business users need the most accurate data possible to resolve claims fairly, assess risks in underwriting, and provide the best possible customer service.

Several years ago, real-time data might’ve been a nice-to-have, rather than a must-have. Today, because of how data processing and transfer methods have evolved, it’s essentially negligent for any insurer to stick with outdated practices or technology in this area.

The Need to Overhaul Entrenched EDI Technology in Favor of APIs

Now, we know how daunting it can be to overhaul an entrenched technology. And EDIs definitely fit the bill for the word “entrenched” based on how long carriers have used them. However, several factors make them incapable of supplying the real-time data insurance users need.

EDIs represent a major error risk because all the procedures involved (entry, testing, validation) require lots of manual work from staff.
Unless data from multiple sources has uniform formatting to begin with — which isn’t guaranteed by any means — it needs to be standardized before an EDI transfer.
As a result, the data transfer for something like a group enrollment (to use just one example) can take weeks or even months.

When insurance platform users are stuck sitting around and waiting for data ingestion to finish before they can move on to the next step, the inevitable delay isn’t going to please customers.

APIs, by contrast, allow real-time data transfer, because all the systems they connect are seamlessly integrated and use up-to-date communication protocols. 

This real-time capability also means updates take place in mere minutes, so if something wasn’t accurate at the time of initial transfer, it’ll be corrected quickly.

An API Success Story: Improved Enrollment Metrics via Seamless Data Exchange

In collaboration with EIS, Wellfleet Insurance Company developed an innovative benefits administration platform that uses APIs to harness the power of real-time data transfer. 

The APIs automatically connect and streamline multiple data sets into Wellfleet’s core system, enabling fast quoting, real-time claims updates, and efficient billing processes. This reduced the need for old data processing practices, while also ensuring customer and group member information was accurate and up to date, enhancing their customer experience.

Leveraging APIs ultimately boosted Wellfleet’s operational efficiency, minimized errors, and reduced the time required for customers to complete enrollment cycles. 

Superior Technology and Integration

Having gotten this far, it’s worth noting that APIs are only as powerful as the technology they’re a part of. Ideally, they should support airtight integration for optimal communication between internal systems, critical business applications, and external third-party solutions.

Wellfleet built its API-driven platform on EIS OneSuite. Our cloud-native, customer-centric coretech platform serves as a single source of truth for customer data, providing centralized and secure data management. 

Unlike modern legacy systems that rely on batch file integration via EDIs, EIS OneSuite gives insurers access to more than 9,000 open APIs. This guarantees real-time data integration between all applications within an ecosystem, whether internal or external. It also improves the user experience by providing a comprehensive view of benefits and enabling personalized engagement and shopping experiences for employees.

Ready to embrace the API revolution?

By using cloud-native, data-fluid coretech from EIS and the expansive selection of APIs that come with our flagship platform, insurers can address the challenges they face and also make things easier for customers, brokers, partners, and all other relevant users.

EIS OneSuite can connect an effective technology ecosystem that helps you streamline and accelerate operations. To learn more about how our API-driven solution allows greater automation, helps you save time and money, and minimizes errors across policy administration, data management, claims processing, and billing, get in touch with us today.

Book a call

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There’s also a regulatory incentive for insurers operating in key national and international markets. Any carrier with EU business interests is bound by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which manifests itself in nation-specific laws for each member state. US insurers that don’t want to leave California customers on the table must follow the equally stringent California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). And while Canada’s proposed nationwide data law, the Digital Charter Implementation Act, hasn’t yet cleared the House of Commons, Quebec’s Law 25 takes full effect September 22, 2024, bringing GDPR-esque data privacy requirements standards to the nation’s second-largest provincial market.

The passage of these laws (and similar legislation in major national markets like Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea), indicates that lawmakers have grown to share consumers’ concerns. But even insurers not strictly bound by any all-encompassing regulation should view this as an opportunity. Having the right coretech foundation can help them realize it.

The Necessary Burden

Customer concerns over data privacy didn’t materialize out of nowhere. 

Data breaches are a significant factor, of course. The biggest ones make major headlines — most recently, Ticketmaster, AT&T, and the National Public Data leak that exposed 2.9 billion Americans’ Social Security numbers and other personally identifiable information (PII). The average person gets wind of such stories and understands the gravity of the issue, even if they can’t quote specific stats off the top of their head.

While the average number of breached accounts worldwide fell somewhat between 2022 and 2023 (the most recent years with complete data available), these incidents have grown more expensive. As of mid-2024, the global average cost is $4.88 million (up 10% from last year). That figure almost doubles for the average US breach — $9.36 million, with the Middle East, Benelux, Germany, and Italy rounding out the top five (at $8.75 million, $5.9 million, $5.31 million, and $4.73 million, respectively). Customer PII is more commonly exposed than any other data type, including intellectual property or employee PII. 

In addition to breaches, large-scale incidents of data misuse ranging from Meta (formerly Facebook) to Cambridge Analytica have further tested public trust. Now, when customers provide sensitive data to various companies, including insurers, many of them have greater expectations for its security. They also want at least some transparency (and control) over how that data is used, especially if the information is shared between partnered businesses. 

Juggling Regulations and Consumer Priorities

The requirement to quickly notify affected consumers (and relevant authorities) when data breaches occur is fairly common even in “mild” data privacy legislation. Consumers are also increasingly receiving the right to opt out of certain marketing-related data tracking, or request that their data be deleted once it’s served its purpose. 

Data privacy laws on the more stringent side are more likely to require the destruction or anonymization of PII that’s no longer relevant. Some also expect businesses handling PII to appoint an executive to oversee data protection efforts (often called a chief data officer). The right to data portability — providing individuals with full records of their stored personal information upon request — is yet another concept pioneered by the GDPR that’s gaining ground in other far-reaching data privacy laws.

Although the GDPR’s noncompliance fines and other penalties have arguably received the most attention, nearly all of the wide-ranging data regulations impose similar financial consequences. Some fines are large to begin with, while others start small but add up with repeated violations.

Aside from the regulatory necessity of data protection in certain markets, insurers must understand that some customers will consider the issue when making purchase decisions. This can easily be a factor in markets where data privacy isn’t federally regulated (like the US) but consumers generally understand the danger of data exposure. Granted, it likely won’t be the only thing that drives them to choose one carrier over another. But if, for example, two P&C insurers offer essentially identical coverage and one has better data security and privacy services, which do you think the consumer is likely to pick?

EIS OneSuite: The Ideal Solution for Data-Conscious Insurers

Keeping customer data safe requires insurers to take a multifaceted approach — and EIS OneSuite provides the means.

Support for Customers’ Data Rights

EIS OneSuite privacy settings default to the highest level of confidentiality, so insurers effectively begin working to protect customer data as soon as they implement the solution. The platform also gives insurance customers a degree of agency in how their data is used and stored.

For example, the customer-facing portals of all EIS OneSuite core products give consumers control of data access settings to modify as they see fit. Also, the platform supports data minimization — collecting PII only for specific purposes and destroying or anonymizing it once it’s no longer needed. Lastly, EIS OneSuite makes it easy for insurers to fulfill data portability requests or purge customer data upon demand.

Thorough Transparency and Disclosure

Insurers using EIS OneSuite will find it easy to create (and regularly update) clear privacy policies that customers can readily access, so they fully understand how their data is used and shared. This includes details on any automated decision-making processes that leverage customer data and the management of any facial recognition or other biometric data.

Also, in the event of a breach, EIS OneSuite enables insurers to automate the release of detailed data breach notices for affected customers and regulators. This way, consumers hear about it from carriers within any required time frame.

Risk Assessment and Compliance Reporting

Evaluating the impact of both new projects and existing processes on data privacy is crucial to ensuring PII isn’t needlessly put at risk. EIS OneSuite makes it easy to conduct risk assessments and determine any privacy hazards caused by data processing procedures, planned initiatives, or data transfers.

Continuous monitoring and reporting is also crucial to upholding customer data privacy. Through its support for intelligent automation and seamless data integration capabilities, EIS OneSuite streamlines and simplifies breach incident logging, data processing audits, and compliance report generation activities. Because the solution’s integrations extend to third-party systems, carriers can also monitor the data protection practices of their partners.

Internal Governance and Education

Without buy-in and commitment from their internal teams, insurers can’t establish excellent data protection practices. EIS OneSuite helps carriers make sure that their business users across all lines and departments can easily access governance standards and educational materials that stress the importance of safeguarding customer PII and help staff learn data protection best practices.

Ready to Safeguard Customer Data with Cloud-Native Coretech?

As organizations that rely on the precise assessment of risk, insurers have to treat data privacy with the urgency it deserves.

At EIS, we’re committed to helping insurers across multiple markets ‌safeguard their customers’ invaluable data — and we’re also invested in assisting them with data privacy compliance efforts. Get in touch with an EIS representative today to learn more.

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Would you have a plan in place, or be floundering? For any insurer, even a fairly short outage (one to three days) could cause costly setbacks, and anything beyond five days might as well be no-man’s-land.

The recent CrowdStrike outage shows why insurers need a safety net that legacy and many modern legacy core systems can’t give them. By contrast, the cloud-native (and cloud-agnostic) flexibility of EIS Platform means it can be a foundation for insurance business continuity.

First a Bug, Then a Swarm: Anatomy of an Outage

CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity vendor to half the Fortune 500, attempted to update its Falcon Sensor anti-malware platform on July 19. The glitch crashed all Windows PCs and devices that received it (about 8.5 million machines). CrowdStrike traced the outage to a bug in Content Validator: a system intended to detect glitchy updates.

The outage forced airlines worldwide to cancel thousands of flights on the 19th and over the following days. Financial institutions experienced disruptions or failures within internal systems and customer-facing apps. Emergency call centers went down all over the US for hours-long stretches.

And that just scratches the surface of the outage’s effects. 

Microsoft regional director and cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt called it the largest in world history. Companies affected by the outage likely lost over $5 billion in revenue and gross profit. Many affected systems were back up the same day or by June 20, but full recovery will likely take weeks.

Modern Legacy’s Lack of Contingency

Insurers still using legacy or modern legacy core systems are effectively playing chicken with their business continuity. This is just as true of modern legacy systems that’ve been lifted-and-shifted to the cloud as it is of those relying on centralized server infrastructure.

Why? Above all, systems that are only “cloud-based” in name are usually migrated to one specific public cloud provider — AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, etc. If the cloud goes down for any reason, the system goes down with it, and all the mission-critical operations it supports grind to a halt. 

The system vendor can give the affected customer the base code to redeploy the system, but full recovery from the ground up takes six to nine months, and the business losses an insurer undergoes in that time might be fatal. (This is no better than what you’d deal with post-outage if you had fully on-premises core infrastructure.)

Being tied to a single cloud also comes with potential regulatory headaches. 

First off: In certain jurisdictions, cloud providers must maintain the approval of the regulatory bodies that’ve given them licenses to operate. These agencies (the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, various EU organizations and their national counterparts in member states, etc.) can take away those licenses at any time, and repeated outages or breaches can quickly erode regulators’ trust. 

Additionally, because insurers are essentially outsourcing a critical service, regulators require them to (upon request) attest to the resilience of that service’s provider (and the provider’s sub-supplier ecosystem). Carriers must also offer proof that they could seamlessly continue operations in the event of a “stressed exit” (i.e., a cloud provider outage). Insurers with modern legacy systems hosted by a single cloud vendor don’t have a suitable plan for such an event and face significant risk as a result.

Cloud-Native + Cloud-Agnostic = Cloud-Secure

We know that the cloud providers and other critical vendors insurers rely upon don’t suffer outages or breaches regularly. But they happen often enough — and, increasingly, to devastating effect — that having a flexible safety net is a must. (Or think of it this way: Having no plan isn’t a risk any smart organization should take on, least of all one in the business of protecting from risk.)

As cloud-native coretech, EIS Platform has been expressly engineered for cloud-based operational excellence. But for resilience purposes, the platform’s cloud-agnostic nature matters more. Though it’s paired with a single cloud of your choice like AWS or Azure upon deployment, it’s compatible with all the major offerings, and can also accommodate private cloud infrastructure.

If Azure has an outage, EIS starts moving your operations to AWS (or another cloud of your choice, public or private). This helps minimize downtime and all the losses that come with it. Replace with – This provides the insurer with choice, whether they decided to move to an alternate cloud provider, are forced to do so, or decided to provide the service inhouse – all options are open 

We also offer “SaaS escrow:” It requires advance setup but further strengthens your safety net: If EIS itself suffers a catastrophic outage or busines failure, you can immediately step in and take over the environment and applications you built on the EIS platform  from a cloud repository, alongside the instructions and documentation for your IT team to run the core operations. In essence business continuity is a paper exercise, not a technical one..

Protect Yourself Sooner, Not Later

On Jan. 17, 2025, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) takes full effect in the EU, emphasizing the need for “multi-line operational resilience” among other key provisions. 

This means insurers operating in or planning to enter the EU market must ensure their core systems aren’t tied to a single cloud provider. Failure to comply could result in significant penalties and operational disruptions. 

But whether or not you operate in the EU, consider the potential consequences of not being prepared: an unexpected outage with your sole cloud provider, or system provider could leave your systems down for days, resulting in substantial financial losses and damage to your reputation. (Just imagine the chaos if customer claims systems weren’t accessible during a natural disaster, or if your underwriting platform went down during a peak renewal period.) 

Having a cloud-native and cloud-agnostic solution like EIS Platform mitigates these risks by allowing seamless transition between multiple cloud environments, ensuring continuous operations even if one provider fails. Additionally, SaaS escrow gives you the additional ‘insurance’ of  access to your critical applications and data in case of a catastrophic failure, with the ability to ‘step-in’ further strengthening your operational resilience. 

Talk to an EIS colleague now and start setting your company up for an ambitious — but well-guarded — path. Taking proactive steps now will ensure regulatory compliance and protect your business from unforeseen disruptions, safeguarding your operations and maintaining customer loyalty.

The post How the CrowdStrike Outage Illustrates Insurers’ Need for Resilience appeared first on EIS.

The post How the CrowdStrike Outage Illustrates Insurers’ Need for Resilience appeared first on EIS.

But that’s been changing quite a bit recently:

End consumers are more aware than ever of financial security. Employers want to offer competitive benefits packages to keep top talent. Regulation organisations are imposing more customer-friendly requirements on insurers that they must adhere to. 

At the end of the day, this all ties back to a need for better operations: whether it’s to get new products to market faster, or nimbly comply with new customer communication regulations. 

This is where the four components of MACH-based architecture come in to help protection insurers gain and keep a competitive edge:

M = Microservices

An architecture with microservices decouples an overall application into loosely-coupled services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. This makes digital transformation projects and long-term maintenance much easier to handle.  

Without microservices, you’re essentially putting all your eggs in one large, clunky, monolithic basket. If that basket gets a hole in it, all your eggs fall out. In tech terms, if you encounter one issue on any part of your monolithic (microservices-less) architecture, it’ll affect the entire system.

But with microservices, you get stronger resilience and fault tolerance. The system as a whole can better handle unexpected errors and disruptions, and if one microservice fails, it won’t affect the overall system.

Having microservices as part of your architecture also means that if you want to start a digital transformation, you can upgrade one piece at a time without detracting from ongoing operations.

A = API First

In today’s protection world, user experience is paramount. If you’re not giving brokers, employers, and customers an easy user experience, they’re apt to shop around for other carriers that’ll do a better job.

APIs are the catalysts that take you from being a standalone insurer to becoming the ecosystem that all your users love. 

Considering their important role, APIs need to be at the core of your architecture, with a standardised and consistent way for the connected technologies to communicate with each other.

Having an API-first approach to architecture is crucial to fostering innovation and growth. Without it, you’ll have a hard time integrating new services and applications into your growing ecosystem. You also won’t get the interoperability needed with third-party vendors, insurtechs, or other industry players that help you provide holistic, to-die-for customer experiences.

C = Cloud Native

While digital transformation can be costly, switching to a cloud-native platform is one place where the total cost of ownership starts to make sense.

Because of the cloud’s pay-as-you-go pricing model, carriers can save money on bandwidth during slower seasons, and use the bandwidth they need during busier seasons without slowing down operations. Cloud nativity solves the catch-22 of not wanting to pay for unneeded server space, but having it available during times of need. It gives you the best of both worlds.

Cloud-native features don’t end there. It also lets insurers develop and deploy applications without the need to manage servers, reducing complexity and maintenance overhead while optimising workflows and streamlining operations.

H = Headless (But Not Mindless) Possibilities

Without getting too far into the technological weeds, the “headless” principle enables the separation of the front-end user interface from back-end applications. 

Insurers who choose a headless approach can create more flexible and customised end-user experiences, whether for individual payers, HR departments, brokers, or customer service. By separating the front-end interfaces from the back-end applications, data can flow more freely, and more customisations and personalised offers can happen in real time.

However, having headless options built into a platform’s architecture doesn’t mean an insurer must utilise the headless setup. If you prefer, you’re still 100% able to manage the back-end and the front-end applications as a single system to avoid replicating any changes. Ambitious insurers need the power to choose a back-to-front setup that works best for their operations, and having this flexibility built into your coretech ensures you have the functionality you need.

MACH = the Perfect Match for Protection’s Tech Needs

With better architecture at your core, you don’t just have to adapt to market changes — you can lead the way. 

MACH-based architecture catapults your protection insurance business into much higher efficiency and customer satisfaction. With its innovative blend of microservices, API-first design, cloud-native solutions, and headless capabilities, MACH is the key to staying ahead and future-proofing yourself. 

Still exploring your platform options? Sign up for our bite-size newsletter to learn how to nitpick the best one for your business without the influence of biased opinions.

The post Why MACH’s 4 Components Win in Protection Insurance appeared first on EIS.

The post Why MACH’s 4 Components Win in Protection Insurance appeared first on EIS.

When you compound the promise of better time and cost efficiency with insurance needs like regulatory changes, in-flux market dynamics, and changing consumer expectations around what their experiences as customers look like with the companies they buy from… it makes operating on the cloud even more desirable. With the cloud, you get agile and adaptive abilities that you just don’t get with legacy technology.

However, there are a number of things to consider before fully plunging into a core digital transformation to operate on the cloud.

Misconceptions & Realities about Insurance Cloud Operations

Just because something is easy to buy doesn’t always mean it’s easy to use.

For example, many cloud providers aren’t as responsive to your team’s internal needs as your own internal IT department would be. Further, true multi-tenancy in insurance is very challenging, because of regulatory, resiliency, and security issues that are almost insurmountable with insurance’s requirements. (Moreover, when a multi-tenant system experiences downtime, it impacts all tenants simultaneously.)

Cost savings in cloud operations often come from reducing labor needs, rather than reducing technology-related costs, which is a common misconception.

Unique Complexities & Risks

One significant  reason insurers want to “upgrade” to operate on the cloud is to gain more agility and flexibility.

However, if you’re not careful to have thorough discussions about how system changes are managed with your potential SaaS vendors, you could unintentionally paint yourself into a corner here. When the vendor takes on the operational risk, they have to protect themselves against continuous changes so they can maintain their service agreements.

Making sure insurer and vendor roles are clearly defined is crucial  to ensuring you don’t move to the cloud for speed and flexibility, but end up becoming even more constrained than you were before.

Cloud Success Recommendations

The above two sections might have felt like a downer, but the good news is there are ways to be incredibly successful on the cloud. (We just wanted to let you in on some of the potential pitfalls so you don’t fall into them!)

First and foremost, make sure the cloud platform offers robust API integration. With extensive options for solid API connections, both insurers and their customers can interact with the system, without hindering business as usual for anyone. This adaptability can’t be retrofitted after the fact, so this is something to look for from the get-go.

Second, avoid viewing a new platform as a simple, self-managing solution.

Although it’s tempting to believe in the self-sufficiency promoted by  SaaS B2B marketing, core systems are a completely different animal.

The new platform you choose should have enough flexibility, APIs, DevOps capabilities, and configuration tooling so that your teams can make needed changes without relying on vendor hand-holding. If the platform or the available ecosystem of connection is too prescriptive here, it only limits your innovation options as the insurance market continues to evolve.

Curious About Updating to the Cloud?

The decision to update to a cloud-based core system isn’t one that’s made overnight — nor should it be.

There’s a lot to consider, and we understand the needs insurers have to carefully consider any potential risk involved in a move like this.

If you’d like to discuss what a move to the cloud would look like for your company, with your unique needs and nuances, book a call with one of our account executives here.

The post To Cloud or Not To Cloud? That is the Question. appeared first on EIS.

The post To Cloud or Not To Cloud? That is the Question. appeared first on EIS.

Industry curveballs happen all the time. New regulations, acquisitions that create harder-to-compete-with USPs, new competitors, and newer, more innovative products to compete with — it’s always something.

Though legacy technology makes it difficult to stay ahead of rapid changes, the right tools can empower protection insurers to both keep up and stand out as industry leaders.

Static Tech: The Ultimate Agility Blocker

There’s undoubtedly been a fundamental uptick in the cadence of protection insurers making strategic moves, with no signs of slowing down.

Unfortunately, the static, monolithic systems of old don’t have the tooling or deployability to adjust to these changes and stay competitive.

Because they operate on monolithic code structures, they don’t allow insurers to operate with the speed to market today’s rapid changes demand. Fundamental changes or new policy types can take several months to years, rather than a matter of weeks or just a few months.

Insurers Are Only as Agile as Their Tools Allow

Having the agility to pursue strategic initiatives comes down to selecting the right technological back-bone. The right technology will empower you with low-code or no-code tooling, which frees you to make desired changes without any hand-holding from your vendor. It’ll also have an architecture with strong product governance built in.

Better yet, a microservices setup and open APIs provide the interoperability required for a truly connected ecosystem that can integrate with HR administration software, payroll, and absence management platforms.

Keep Up With Your Ever-Changing Business Needs

A large part of the capability gap between coretech and modern legacy platforms is the agility they allow.

A core platform like EIS OneSuite helps you stay ahead of changes, making strategic moves in a timely manner.

Want to know more about what to look for in this type of technology? Sign up for our bite-size newsletter to learn how to nitpick the best core system for your business.

The post Static vs Agile Tech: Staying Ahead of Protection’s Rapid Changes appeared first on EIS.

The post Static vs Agile Tech: Staying Ahead of Protection’s Rapid Changes appeared first on EIS.

Yes, we get it: it’s changing the world, revolutionizing work as we know it. But there are genuine reasons for concern: sometimes AI hallucinates and states unreliable “facts.”

Most of us have read all the cautionary articles, but since AI is changing the world of work… we just want to see what it’ll mean for us, and how we can use it to (reliably and safely) improve our work processes and outputs.

All talk and no action is incredibly fatiguing, especially when the talk is all about “this is going to change everything,” yet we cease to see changes actually manifesting.

However, even in highly regulated industries like insurance, we are seeing the AI revolution take hold, and in some pretty impressive ways. Top insurance companies are already saving millions on their claims payouts and processing, thanks to AI’s ability to help them detect fraud and initiate better downstream processes after first notice of loss (FNOL).

Why AI in Insurance Requires Lots of Care

In some industries, workers can play around with AI without any severe consequences.

Creatives, for example, can experiment with AI to generate ideas and complete basic tasks, freeing them up to focus on the finer points of their projects.

In regulated industries like insurance, however, AI requires a more cautious approach. Using a tool that’s known to just make up false facts and state them as truth is risky when you’re combining with a highly regulated data set.

Regulated industries need to operate on stated, factual, provable data and nothing else. There’s no room for “fun” AI hallucinations, made-up facts, or incorrect conclusions.

That’s not to say that AI can’t be incredibly useful in insurance — because it can — but it needs to be used intelligently for well-defined means, not just as a generic tool to vaguely “help productivity.”

How EIS Uses AI to Assist Insurers & Save Them Millions

At EIS, we understand the critical need for precision and reliability in the insurance industry. That’s why we’ve developed ClaimSmart™, a machine learning and AI-powered solution designed to reduce fraud, streamline the claims process, and ensure accuracy and efficiency. ClaimSmart is made up of two main solutions: ClaimGuard™ and ClaimPulse™.

ClaimGuard: Proactive AI & ML-Enabled Fraud Detection

ClaimGuard acts as your vigilant, digital fraud guardian. Using AI and machine learning, it analyzes each claim throughout its lifecycle, proactively identifying potential red flags and irregularities for you. This minimizes false claims or overstated payouts, and maximizes your team’s resources. Here’s how it works:

Automatic Analysis: Each claim is analyzed throughout its lifecycle, surfacing potential fraud risks and irregularities.
Rapid Identification: Claims are identified and scored within minutes of the first notice of loss (FNOL), and risk scores are adjusted as more information is added to the claim.

ClaimGuard uses our proprietary risk-scoring insurance model, embedded with machine learning, to score claims based on hundreds of scenarios and data points. This continuous assessment updates fraud scoring and risk insights as the claim matures, seamlessly integrating with your existing core systems and third-party data sources.

ClaimPulse: Efficient, Personalized Claim Journeys that Result in Lower Loss Adjustment Expenses (LAE)

ClaimPulse creates a smoother and more personalized experience for both customers and internal claims teams. It automates workflows based on collected data, reducing processing time and lowering LAE. Key features include:

Customizable Experiences: Collect the right claim data upfront with responsive questions based on policy information.
Automated Workflows: Collected data feeds into and informs the entire claims journey via automated workflows, reducing processing time and lowering LAE.
Customer Empowerment: Allow customers to view their claim status and take action, enhancing transparency, trust, and satisfaction.

ClaimPulse maximizes every customer touchpoint, starting with digital FNOL. It customizes experiences to your line of business, personalizing workflows and triggering events across the customer journey.

See the Difference ClaimSmart Makes

Our customers are currently using ClaimGuard and ClaimPulse to improve scenarios across the entire claims process.

Tokio Marine and Nichido Fire save millions of dollars annually thanks to the fraud detection and claims automation ClaimSmart enables.

Another North American insurer slashed their LAE just by using ClaimPulse and improving FNOL.

See What ClaimSmart AI Can Do For You

Because ClaimSmart tools have been built to use data correctly and to act and update their models to get better over time, it’s one of the best ways for insurers to use AI in a way that’ll have a significant, substantial impact for them… giving ambitious insurers AI enthusiasm instead of AI fatigue.

See the ins and out of ClaimSmart, and what it can do for you right here.

The post AI Fatigue vs AI Enthusiasm: Real-World Impacts on Claims Processing appeared first on EIS.

The post AI Fatigue vs AI Enthusiasm: Real-World Impacts on Claims Processing appeared first on EIS.

And because claims are a huge source of both customer frustration and cost, it makes sense for insurers to focus a lot of their efforts in this area‌. It helps reduce customer churn, and reduce unnecessary processing expenses thanks to technological advancements… especially with AI.

For example, a popular P&C insurer offering auto, home, life, motorcycle, and RV policies across 15 US states recently lowered their loss adjustment expenses (LAE) and claims processing costs significantly with AI from EIS.

Why Traditional Claims Processing Costs Too Much

There’s a lot of manual work involved in traditional claims processing, from data collection to setting fraud detection parameters. 

Because humans are human, manual errors and inefficiencies are inevitable, which causes frustration for both customers and agents. And, because those manual errors in data entry can be done by anyone (customer, agent, or claims adjuster), downstream processes after the initial data entry can be completely out of whack, causing a claim to stay open too long, costing the carrier more. 

How ClaimPulse Changes the Claims Processing & LAE Game

The insurer mentioned above suffered from inefficiencies caused by manual claims processes and inconsistent and variable data. 

By using ClaimPulseTM, the data- and workflow-driven automation layer of ClaimSmartTM, the insurer could focus on their goals of providing a better customer experience and continual improvement via clean data collection and better downstream automations.

By using the First Notice of Loss (FNOL) feature of ClaimPulse, this insurer took advantage of one of the most practical uses of AI for claims. Reflexive questioning takes claim data collected and policy coverage into account as the claimant goes through the process of filing a claim. This ensures the right information is collected, and processes that data cleanly, directly into the relevant claims process automations that happen after FNOL.

They can now gather the right data automatically, use their time more efficiently, and manage their data more reliably. The data processing and automation power of ClaimPulse enabled:

24/7 digital access: Customers can access critical services and file claims anytime and anywhere
Automated data capture: Early collection of detailed, structured loss data significantly streamlines downstream processes and helps claims close sooner
Digital documentation: Users can upload photos of necessary documents
Smart, automated claim assignment: Automated claim assignment and segmentation makes claim processing even faster and more scalable

The Impact: Faster, More Efficient Claims Processing

As a result, the insurer now has:

A faster claims process, pleasing customers and making jobs easier for claims adjusters
Access to more reliable analytics on their claims, driving smarter business decisions
More digital tools for customers to report and track claims, increasing transparency and customer satisfaction
A better claims experience for everyone 
A much lower LAE than before

The Future of Claims Process Automation & Cost Savings is Here: See the Case Study

With ClaimPulse, this insurer moved from manual to automated claims processing, and reduced their LAE. This aligned with their core values to improve customer experience, and to constantly strive for continuous internal improvement‌ as well. 

Their success is a great example of how ambitious insurers are embracing AI to positively impact insurance, benefiting customers and carriers alike. 

If you’d like to see their full case study, check it out here: 

Or, if you’re interested in learning more about ClaimSmart and ClaimPulse, check out our product overview.

The post The Smart, Automated Way to Reduce P&C Loss Adjustment Expenses: How One Insurer Did It appeared first on EIS.

The post The Smart, Automated Way to Reduce P&C Loss Adjustment Expenses: How One Insurer Did It appeared first on EIS.

Despite their name, “modern” legacy platforms offer limited capabilities that don’t measure up to customers’ expectations. Because they lack proper tooling and deployability, these monolithic systems hold protection insurers back from keeping pace with industry changes and reaching their full potential. 

With the right core system, carriers can achieve the agility, personalisation, and scalability they need to remain competitive.

Truly modern coretech has plenty of cutting-edge capabilities to boast about, but this post focuses on three especially game-changing ones: event-driven architecture, a single platform for individual and group policies, and agility to handle speed of change.

1. Event-Driven Architecture

Monolithic systems may be able to send out annual notices with links to coverage information and premium prices, but they can’t serve up the automations and personalisations consumers need as they navigate life changes.

Conversely, the architecture of EIS OneSuite is event-driven and centered around the customer as the main record type. This seemingly simple difference in setup makes for drastic improvements in customer experiences.

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Event-driven architecture is a model that enables companies to detect events — think significant changes or business moments — and trigger actions in response to them, in real time. Rather than send out cold, annual notices, an event-driven platform can act nimbly on data that’s newly entered or picked up by third-party suppliers. For instance, if an income protection customer gets married, has a child, or buys a house, your system can detect that life event and automate a personalised communication with a congratulatory message and a special offer for a higher coverage amount. Though hands-off, event-driven architecture’s personalisation and timeliness enhances customer experiences.

2. Individual and Group Policies on a Single Platform

Outdated platforms were built with limited mindsets around architecture for protection insurers. As a result, most core systems can either only handle group records or individual records — not both.

More employers are expanding group protection packages to include a multitude of standard protection policies, along with new products that may be fully employee-paid. With old systems, this would be difficult to offer.

A customer-centric architecture, on the other hand, focuses policies around customers instead of the other way around. This allows insurers and customers to work within a single platform, where they can select an individual’s protection products and easily manage the group versus individual dynamics, whether in policy or billing.

3. Agility to Handle Speed of Change

Consumer demands aren’t the only things evolving in the protection market‌ — structural business changes are just as present.

Having the agility to pursue strategic initiatives comes down to selecting the right technological back-bone — a choice that could make or break any insurer’s success.

However, legacy platforms hold insurers back from keeping pace with these changes.

The right technology will empower you with low-code or no-code tooling, which frees you to make your desired changes without any hand-holding from your vendor. It’ll also have an architecture with strong product governance built in, ensuring your products are developed, managed, and retired in a manner that maximizes benefits while minimizing potential pitfalls.

Better yet, a microservices setup and open APIs provide the interoperability required to have a truly open and connected ecosystem that can integrate with HR administration software, payroll, and absence management platforms.

Gain the Ultimate Capability Trilogy and Then Some

The growing capability gap between protection insurers who have coretech like EIS OneSuite and ones with modern legacy platforms isn’t going to bridge itself.

Choosing a core platform like EIS helps you achieve agility, personalisation, and scalability — all things you need to maintain a competitive edge.

Want to know more about what to look for in a core system? Sign up for our bite-size newsletter to learn how to nitpick the best one for your business.

The post 3 Tech Capabilities for Protection Insurers to Achieve Their Full Potential appeared first on EIS.

The post 3 Tech Capabilities for Protection Insurers to Achieve Their Full Potential appeared first on EIS.

Using customer-centric (instead of policy-centric) data management is one of the best ways an insurer can create a solid, new, and future-proof organizational data structure that’ll help them innovate like crazy now, and establish themselves as a customer-focused leader in the future.

Why Go Customer-Centric?

The answer lies in the fabric of every interaction an insurance company has with its clients. Each touchpoint, from policy inquiries to claims and renewals, hinges on the accessibility and accuracy of customer data.

For instance, claims are the moment of truth in a customer’s journey with an insurer, and often make or break the relationship. When the experience is good and easy for the customer, they’ll stay as a happy customer for a long, long time. But if things go wrong, or it takes ages for a claim to close, customers will shop around and find a new insurer when their renewal term is up.

When you’ve got a system that’s focused on swiftly pulling together comprehensive and accurate customer data, you can automate a lot of the claims processing, reduce errors, and send out automated (yet personalized) messages, boosting customer satisfaction.

Further, the general expectation of consumers today is that institutions selling to them are using their data for personalized offers. When this doesn’t happen, the insurer in question can seem out of date, or like they just don’t care enough to take individual data pieces into consideration.

When an institution (insurer, online retailer, social media platform, etc.) stores data in individual customer records rather than dispersed product files, this shifts the paradigm. They move from the old-school the-customer-is-just-a-number setup, to a personalized relationship between two equalized, interested parties. This boosts customer loyalty because they feel seen and heard by those providers, but it also helps streamline the selling and delivery processes for the providers in major cost-saving ways.

The Challenges of Customer-Centricity with Modern Legacy (Policy-Centric) Systems

Traditional and even “modern” legacy insurance systems often segment customer data across various platforms and databases, leading to inefficiencies and inaccuracies. 

For example, John Smith might have three different policy types from the same, very large insurer. Instead of having one customer record that showcases all the policies he has with them, there’d be three different policy records with his name attached to each one. 

If he moves and updates the address on his home insurance, for example, that may not get reflected on his auto or life policies.  

Fragmented systems like this require repeated data entry, increasing the risk of errors and reducing operational efficiency. 

And, instead of being able to send John personalized offers that make sense (like a larger life insurance policy to cover the new home he just bought), insurers who use policy-centric technology are stuck simply catching up to make sure all of John’s records are up to date, instead of having real-time data accuracy.

A Customer-Centric Approach: Single Customer Records in EIS CustomerCore

EIS architecture centralizes customer data in CustomerCoreTM, ensuring every piece of information‌ — ‌from basic contact details to complex claim histories‌ — ‌is stored in a single, easily accessible location. 

This unified view not only enhances the accuracy of customer data, but also enables insurers to deliver personalized services more effectively. For example, significant life events like marriage or relocation can trigger automated, relevant communications to customers, like adjusting coverage or updating contact or other policy information.

Claims & AI: Two Places Where Customer-Centricity REALLY Matters

Consider a scenario where an insurer uses EISⓇ to handle a customer’s claim. 

The integrated data allows the insurer to quickly verify claim details, streamline approvals, and facilitate payment processing. This not only enhances the customer’s experience during a stressful time, but also reduces the operational load on the insurer’s staff, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks or customer interactions.

Furthermore, a lot of insurers are now looking for ways to intelligently leverage AI and machine learning. 

If an insurer has customer records that are clean, streamlined, and up-to-date, AI and machine learning can work wonders. Clean, up-to-date data allows these tools to predict customer needs and behaviors, and to offer tailored products and services that meet nuanced demands. 

But if the data on a customer is disjointed and‌ out of date, running AI and machine learning programs that enable communications to customers or seek out operational efficiencies can be a disaster. The algorithm’s predictive capabilities will be out of whack, “personalized” communications could be totally off base or out of date, and training algorithms on old data will just create more inefficiencies that’ll be a pain to deal with long-term.

How EIS CustomerCore Gets the Devil Out of Your Data & Provides Better Outcomes for Everyone

By placing the customer at the heart of their ecosystems, ambitious, future-focused insurers can unlock unprecedented levels of personalization and efficiency, setting new standards in customer care and operational excellence.

EIS CustomerCore does just this, and helps insurers make sure their customer records are always accurate, up-to-date, and not accidentally duplicated, causing confusion. Our data management architecture is designed to append all relevant data to customer records, so insurers, brokers, and the customers themselves can save time and resources at every step of the insurance value chain (pricing, distribution, underwriting, billing, claims, etc).

To see more about CustomerCore architecture and how EIS enables better, data-driven insurance processes and customer experiences, check out our CustomerCore Overview.

Learn About CustomerCore

The post The Devil is in the (Data) Details: Unleashing Future-Proof Insurance via Customer-Centric Data Management appeared first on EIS.

The post The Devil is in the (Data) Details: Unleashing Future-Proof Insurance via Customer-Centric Data Management appeared first on EIS.

With a commitment to being a ‘Good Company,’ defined by a balance of strong products, services, and a deep commitment to customer trust, they wanted to create a better claims experience for everyone involved.

Their innovations would not only improve their customer experience at a critical moment for customer loyalty, but also lead to substantial annual savings in the millions!

See Their Case Study

The Challenge: A Call for Innovation

The insurance giant faced mounting challenges with its claims process, with escalating call center costs and inefficiencies from outdated but embedded data management practices. 

Each claim required cumbersome manual follow-ups, leading to customer frustration and increased fraud risk. The need for a solution was clear: Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire wanted to streamline data collection and management, boost call center efficiency, and improve the overall customer journey.

The Solution: EIS ClaimSmart to the Rescue

ClaimSmart™, a future-focused claims management solution from EIS contains two key solutions that Tokio Marine & Nichodo Fire made use of in their claims revolution: ClaimGuard™ and ClaimPulse™. 

Whether working together or separately, these solutions revolutionize the claims experience for both customers and employees, with the strong ability to reduce expenses in both fraud-related losses and loss adjustment expenses (LAE).

ClaimPulse: This component offers a seamless, omni-channel claims experience that makes everything feel smooth and straight-forward for customers and carriers alike, and it’s the tool that can drastically reduce an insurer’s LAE. 

Through an enhanced, dynamic digital experience, it gave Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire 24/7 access for customers to file claims digitally, helped them capture detailed and extensive loss information at FNOL, and enabled digital uploads of photos and documentation, leading to a more efficient use of time and downstream data use.

ClaimGuard: On the fraud detection front, ClaimGuard provides a sophisticated machine learning (ML) risk scoring model that automatically monitors all claims continuously, both new and mature claims, detects complex fraud patterns, and integrates crucial data into existing systems without disrupting workflows. Risk tolerances can be automatically adjusted as the ML model trains itself over time to be more accurate, even detecting fraud that may go unseen to the human eye — helping its users stay ahead of smart fraudsters.

“We’re proud to be one of ClaimSmart’s first users,” said Atsushi Wada, Claim Dept. Team Manager, Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire. “It’s helping to revolutionise our claims management process for both customers and employees. Inefficient and costly systems and process have been transformed, delivering faster resolutions, increased customer satisfaction, and large-scale operational savings.”

The Outcome: A Win-Win for Everyone

The results were remarkable. 

With ClaimSmart, Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire reduced fraud risks, significantly improved the claims experience for both customers and staff, and saved millions of dollars.

– Enhanced Customer Experience: The seamless claims experience facilitated by ClaimPulse saw a notable increase in customer satisfaction, as reflected by a spike in the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

– Major Fraud Detection & Financial Savings: The introduction of ClaimGuard’s advanced, automated fraud detection led to the identification of five times more instances of attempted fraud, translating to considerable savings. Not to mention how much back-and-forth customer communication time (and resources) were saved because of better FNOL data collection and downstream efficiencies created as a result. The combination of decreased fraud-related losses, time savings on fraud detection, and LAE savings from better data management meant the company saved millions annually.

See Tokio Marine’s ClaimSmart Case Study

A Future-Proof Blueprint for All Ambitious Insurers

Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire’s adoption of ClaimSmart is more than a testament to their commitment to innovation — it’s a blueprint for ambitious insurers at large. 

By embracing future-proof technology, they not only achieved significant operational savings, but also set a new benchmark in customer satisfaction. 

This case study is a compelling example of how making the right technology choices can transform common insurance challenges into opportunities for growth, efficiency, and unparalleled customer service.

See Tokio Marine’s Case Study Now

The post Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire’s Triumph: A Wild Success Story in Claims Revolution appeared first on EIS.

The post Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire’s Triumph: A Wild Success Story in Claims Revolution appeared first on EIS.

ClaimSmartTM, reflective of our relentless pursuit of innovation at EISⓇ, is cutting-edge in the realm of data science in insurance, and is a pivotal step towards redefining insurance claims management with future-proof technology. With AI and machine learning (ML) at its core, ClaimSmart is designed to complement and enhance existing claims management solutions, like our own ClaimCoreⓇ, or any other claims management system an insurer uses. 

While ClaimSmart can still fully and seamlessly integrate with any core system an insurer uses, integrating ClaimSmart with ClaimCore from EIS gives insurers some especially great advantages in the marketplace. (Which we’ll get into below!)

But first, what exactly is ClaimSmart?

ClaimSmart is an AI- and machine-learning-powered cloud solution that eliminates redundant manual work in claims processing, boosts fraud detection, and provides a much better customer experience. The two parts of ClaimSmart, ClaimGuard™ and ClaimPulse™, have their particular areas of specialty: 

ClaimGuard is our AI and ML solution that detects fraud and scores each claim for fraud risk, enhancing the security and integrity of the claims process. With advanced analytics and a cutting-edge machine learning algorithm, ClaimGuard automatically analyzes the data points of each claim with a nuanced risk scoring system. This ensures legitimate claims get processed and closed quickly, while claims requiring more scrutiny are passed to the appropriate claims examiners for review and outcome determination. 

As you use ClaimGuard and give it more feedback on which claims were and were not fraudulent, it picks up on nuances humans might miss, helping you spot claims and stay ahead of new schemes insurance fraudsters cook up. 

ClaimPulse integrates with your existing claims processing system (whether it’s EIS ClaimCoreⓇ or another solution), and adds in a smart layer of efficiency and technological sophistication. 

Using digital FNOL as an initial touchpoint with a claim, ClaimPulse uses reflexive questioning based on ingested claim data and a claimant’s policy coverage. Manual processing, data entry errors, and the need for claimant follow-ups to gather more information are reduced. Plus, collecting all the correct data automatically and upfront means more downstream automations and efficiencies are possible, speeding up the time from initial FNOL to resolution.

Why ClaimSmart + EIS?

When you pair ClaimSmart with ClaimCore from EIS OneSuiteTM, things get really exciting and even more streamlined for a better customer (and insurer) experience. 

Because the architecture of EIS OneSuite is fully customer-centric and event-driven, you’re able to integrate ClaimSmart to do things other insurers can’t, like: 

Automatically setting off a chain of events that can be processed 24/7 the instant a new piece of required data is entered on a claim, potentially taking it as far as closure. 
Automate and customize customer communications about each step of the claims process, giving a hand-holding experience like no other‌ — ‌without your customer service reps lifting a finger. 
Automate customer-specific workflows to handle those who submit fraudulent claims. 
Give the highest level of transparency into claims processing, so customers, brokers, and everyone involved knows what’s happening, and they get more information when they check on the claim than simply “processing.” 
If a piece of data is picked up that a claim needs to be started, the system can create a digital FNOL for the insured, and workflows can immediately step in to get the customer or other parties involved to input needed information.

Curious How Much ClaimSmart AI Could Save You?

If reducing claims leakage and optimizing your claims processing is something you’d like to start taking care of in the next year or so, get in touch with a member of our team. Even if you’re not using EIS OneSuite right now, ClaimSmart can do a lot for you, and we’d love to help you figure out how it can better impact your KPIs, and how that translates to money saved.

The post New Product Alert! ClaimSmart Launches a New Era of Data-Driven Claims Efficiency & Personalization with AI and ML appeared first on EIS.

The post New Product Alert! ClaimSmart Launches a New Era of Data-Driven Claims Efficiency & Personalization with AI and ML appeared first on EIS.

The first deadline was more of a checkbox exercise. It gave insurers room to manoeuvre, saying, “Yes, we can generally prove we’re not being unfair to our customers,” and was much easier to comply with.

Now, things are getting more difficult, and regulators are turning up the heat on financial service institutions.

What’s different about this deadline?

The July deadline will require businesses to be more specific in their compliance… in a very, very real way.

For one, firms will have to have evidence of their progress documented in their annual board report by July 31st. In other words, now that you’ve had time to digest what the regulations and expectations will be, you’ve got to prove how you’re putting pen to paper and doing something about it. It’s no longer a question of how you feel, but what exactly you’re improving in your customer relations.

(For example, if there were cases where you weren’t communicating with a customer for years at a time, is that really treating them fairly? No. So… what systems or actions are you putting in place to remedy that?)

Financial institutions aren’t expected to have everything ironed out by this date, but the idea is that they’ll start making improvements, and enter a cycle of continual improvement and learning.

Why this deadline is so much more than just a regulatory check box:

The whole idea, of course, is to make the world of financial services more equitable and easy to navigate and manage for customers. Regulators can clearly see that the technology exists to do this, and that it’s permeating almost every other consumer-facing industry out there thanks to big tech, so they’re calling on financial services to step up to the plate.

Unfortunately, what they don’t realise is how much work it could (potentially) take to integrate all that modern technology on top of legacy systems that’ve been humming along for decades.

An equitable and easy-to-navigate consumer experience sounds ideal for banking and financial services, for sure. The reality, however, is that the functionality just doesn’t exist within old systems to make it happen.

When you take a modern-looking, future-focused approach to insurance overall (and not just in the context of FCA requirements), you start to see just how much customer-centric technology is necessary.

Customer-Centric Setups & What to Look For

The easy way to explain big tech’s personalisation at scale is that they set up their operations around their customers — not around their products.

So many times, financial service firms and insurance companies have this reversed.

In the past, this was just the way insurance businesses were run. “Digitising” simply meant making the manual operations or aspects of customer experiences digital, rather than re-imagining how to do things in a fundamentally different way with the new technology available.

Digitally-native big tech companies, though, have only ever operated online, and thus have this setup ingrained in them. This gives them two key competitive advantages:

Deep knowledge of their customer base
Extensive control over customer files, and the ability to act on them

Thanks to these two advantages, big tech companies know exactly who their customers are, what behavior led them to become customers, and what they’re likely to buy next. This insight creates opportunities to build deep, lasting relationships and significant brand loyalty.

Insurance companies can have a setup like this too, if they know what to look for.

Rather than putting a digital plaster over a product-centric wound, it’s best to start fresh with something that’s actually customer centric. Instead of something that’ll require constant, complex updates to just barely service your customers, you’ll want something that’s agile and ready to match new market expectations.

Not only that, but once you have this customer-centric setup, all the data you have on a customer will automatically become useful in serving your customers much better. Your information is no longer siloed and obstructed from making a customer’s experience more cohesive and complete. Instead, every piece of data can be used to offer better prices, suggest more relevant coverage levels, or suggest different types of policies entirely if they’d be better for a person’s financial situation.

When that happens, you can have the kind of customer service experiences people‌ love… not to mention complying with the Consumer Duty regulations with flying colors.

Want to see what to look for in a core system to help you treat the new Consumer Duty regulations like the massive opportunity they are, instead of like just another annoying item on the to-do list?

Check out our guide on nitpicking core systems for the best technology here: Nitpick Core Systems Like an Analyst.

Or book a call with EIS.

P.S. Could this Mean a Fairness Index?

A sort of “post-script” thought, if you will, but this is an idea we find fascinating:

One of the possible outcomes from these consumer duty regulations, and why they’re so important for insurers to treat as an opportunity rather than a “do enough to tick the boxes” requirement, is the potential of a fairness index.

This is speculation on our part, but it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to imagine that, for example, we’d be able to see how our banks and insurers stack up against other banks and insurers in terms of customer fairness. If one institution ranks low, or can’t point to the technical, tangible things that make them one of the fairer institutions on the market, it’ll be a huge threat to their customer churn rate over time.

Could we see customers buying on fairness in the future? What do you think?

The post Are You Ready for the Next Wave of Consumer Duty? appeared first on EIS.

The post Are You Ready for the Next Wave of Consumer Duty? appeared first on EIS.

But just because these strategies are optimizing on recent tech trends doesn’t mean they’re falling prey to shiny object syndrome. These digital transformations and adaptations are rooted in core system updates that have been a long time coming, and will help insurers stay digitally resilient for years to come. 

This blog post was adapted from this article in Actuarial Post, where we released our insurance sector forecast for this year.

1. Settling the Great AI Debate

With the explosion of AI in 2023, there was a lot of fear and confusion, especially for highly regulated industries like insurance that can’t afford any “hallucinated” data or information. 

In 2024, though, we’ll see solid, incremental action in this area. Keeping employees and customers aware of AI usage within an insurer, however, will be paramount.

AI will be used for what it’s good at now, especially in areas of reducing claims leakage like reducing human error, and identifying and mitigating fraud.

2. Adaptability Speed Becomes #1 in Digital Transformation

Gone are the days when insurers could plug along with the status quo and take months or years to deploy even the smallest changes in pricing or policy. The world is changing rapidly, and the financial security individuals rely on (insurance) needs to keep up. 

We’ll see underwriters adopt real-time data sources and use OpenL-style pricing engines. Property insurers will be able to adapt to new reinsurance services, like the Flood Re initiative, and motor insurers will be able to gain control of their supply chains to create internal efficiencies and improve customer experience.

3. Fast Innovation Will Only Get Faster

Insurtechs will keep pushing insurance as a whole to stay modern and focus on the future.

Insurers will welcome this, and we predict even more fintech-style acquisitions in 2024.

4. Health Insurance Leaps Into the Unknown

Post-pandemic, customers are more aware of their health than ever before, and expect their healthcare to be more customized. Wearables, IoT, and other smart devices that let individuals manage their health data will come online fast, and health insurers will be expected to adapt.

Here, we’ll see blockchain step in to improve the sharing of medical data in the healthcare system.

5. Group Insurance Becomes Relationship-Based

Just like customers expect their health insurance providers to be more personal, they’ll also expect the insurance carriers in their employee benefits packages to do the same.

In group benefits, we’ll see a desire to optimize and personalize customer service driving technology innovation. Lengthy onboarding processes are no fun for employees, and the complex data integrations and low enrollment rates aren’t good for HR departments or insurers.

We’ll see more embedded digital offerings, mirroring the rest of the fintech world, and a new generation of workplace benefits emerging, both in the US and in EMEA.

6. Investment Opens Up

Even though the economy is a little less than recovered, insurers will continue investing in innovation, because they know that this is what will drive their success and sustainable longevity.

However, because inflation is easing and investment performance is going up, access to credit will increase while shareholder pressure decreases, giving breathing room for more strategic investment for the long-term.

7. Per-Customer Offer Customizations

In the shift towards customer-centricity, insurers who adopt a customer-centric architecture will have the data (and the data structure) to feed a modular approach to insurance products.

We’ll see more insurers with digital platforms enabling more direct-to-consumer propositions, with consistent and personalized interactions across multiple touchpoints to back them up.

8. Analog Life Insurers Racing to Digital

Now that the business case for digitization in life insurance has improved with lower cost of change, transformation in this sector will accelerate. Quickly.

We predict that permission-based, fintech-like services in this market will be on the rise this year as more and more life insurers adapt the technology to enable it.

9. Regulatory Requirements Keep Pushing Digital Transformation Forward

Working hand-in-hand with consumer expectations, governmental bodies are taking notice of what technology can enable, and where it’s in the consumer’s best interest to require certain financial bodies to embrace and deploy this tech to better serve their customers.

To be clear, most regulatory bodies don’t care exactly what technological setup you have at your core. They’re just concerned that you’re delivering on the required end result.

When insurers stay a step ahead and proactively integrate these new requirements into their strategic planning, they notice the alignment in technological enablement that the market is demanding anyway, and will come out as leaders.

10. Agility and Customer-Centricity Become the Key Competitive Differentiators

Being able to meet consumer demands quickly is the thing that will differentiate one insurer’s competitive edge over another both this year and into the future.

When insurers focus on having the backend technology needed to drive this agility and customer-centricity, they’re ready to capitalize on emerging opportunities the instant they come up.

“Speed of adaptivity will be the defining characteristic of 2024,” said our own Rory Yates in this article. “The headwinds the sector is facing and the changes required to confront them are multifaceted. Only those ambitious enough to adapt will move from the slow to the fast lane of change, accelerating past competition at a blistering pace.”

2024’s Transformation Agendas will be Ambitious & Future-Focused

“In the rapidly evolving insurance market,” said EIS CEO Alec Miloslavsky, “distribution expansion, ecosystem building, and embedded offerings will drive transformation agendas… These strategic pillars won’t only redefine how insurers reach customers but also enhance the integration of services, delivering personalized experiences at scale.”

If you’re interested in knowing how to pick out the best technological backbone for your company to enable all of this, check out our series, Nitpick Core Systems Like an Analyst. It delivers in easy-to-read, bite-size pieces, and helps you make sure you select only the best for your company’s needs.

The post 2024 Insurance Outlook: A Digitally Resilient Future appeared first on EIS.

The post 2024 Insurance Outlook: A Digitally Resilient Future appeared first on EIS.

While the theories behind our technology and MACH-based architecture sound fantastic, the proof isn’t rooted in theory — it’s rooted in the implementation, execution, and results. 

Here are what four fellow protection carriers have accomplished with EIS solutions:

AIG Canada: 95% Decrease in Time to Issue Policies

By using EIS OneSuite to upgrade their group benefits platform, AIG Canada has experienced some major wins. 

For starters, the insurer saw a 95% decrease in time to issue policies while slashing time to review policies by 90%. Internally, these time-saving results lead to more bandwidth for teams to focus on mission-critical tasks. Externally, customers spend less time waiting for answers, boosting their overall experience.

Full platform implementation can take years, but with EIS OneSuite, AIG Canada only needed 11 months. Better yet, the implementation cost 20% less than the budget they’d set. 

On top of all of that, AIG Canada launched 27 new products across four product lines, with a 75% reduction in the time required to introduce new products. These quick moves have given the insurer a nimble edge that few competitors can keep up with.

Major North American Mutual Insurance Company: 6 New Products in Only 7 Months

Next up is a major mutual insurance company in North America that partnered with EIS to launch new products in record time.

This carrier delivered six new products in under seven months. They also launched critical illness and accident products for individual sale in just six months. When you compare these timelines to the industry average of one product launch every 18 months, you see just how much of an accelerator the core system can be.

Their CIO said it best: “Technology is rapidly transforming all of our lines of business. This was an opportunity to collaborate with some of the industry leaders in technology, along with our business partners, to bring a winning set of capabilities to market rapidly and effectively.”

Wellfleet: A Consistent, Multi-Channel Experience in Under 11 Months

Seeking to provide a consistent, multi-channel experience for their policyholders, Wellfleet approached EIS to build a customer-centric platform.

This partnership enabled Wellfleet to process all of their fourth-quarter business for new cases and major re-enrollments to satisfy a January 1 effective date. The insurer also cut their data validation process from weeks to just days or hours. By saving time, Wellfleet has improved its customer experience and given its internal teams more bandwidth for other tasks.

The carrier also deployed a single platform in under 11 months for four different products. Once again, comparing this deployment timeline and product volume to the industry average shows the incredible agility EIS OneSuite provides.

To enhance customer experiences further, they launched the ability to generate customised plan designs with a smooth flow of accurate, case-specific information from quote to claim. This capability gives customers the personalised, enhanced experiences Wellfleet initially sought.

The company’s Executive Vice President, Workplace Benefits James Ocampo said, “Many carriers use a patchwork of legacy systems, creating barriers for producers and implementation shipwrecks for employers. Working with EIS, we were able to build a customer-centric platform with a consistent, multichannel experience.”

Major North American Life Insurance Company: Increased NPS by 40 Points & Huge Reduction in Time to Make Regulatory Changes

A major life insurance company partnered with EIS to expand their reach to independent and part-time workers who don’t have access to employer-sponsored protection plans.

They achieved 80% digital engagement with their members, and a two-to-three-month reduction in the time to make regulatory changes live across all systems. Together, these achievements have minimised the company’s use of manual processes and increased their team’s bandwidth for other priorities.

Further, working with EIS has also boosted this insurance company’s Net Promoter Score — the ultimate measure of customer loyalty and satisfaction — by 40 points.

Not only did this insurer tap into the individual market, they also provided stellar customer experiences to those they interacted with.

Better Coretech To Reach Your Goals ASAP

If you’re anything like the insurers above, finding the right technology partner may be the one thing standing between you and your ambitious goals.

We built EIS OneSuite to have time-saving, customer-centric features so you can gain a competitive edge in the marketplace. Get in touch if you’d like to see more detail on what EIS OneSuite can do for you. 

Still exploring your coretech options? 

Sign up for our bite-size newsletter to learn how to nitpick the best one for your business without the influence of biased opinions.

The post 4 Protection Insurers Slashing Costs & Saving Time With EIS OneSuite appeared first on EIS.

The post 4 Protection Insurers Slashing Costs & Saving Time With EIS OneSuite appeared first on EIS.

The earliest platforms were built around doing jobs that directly reflected manual insurance operations at the time. While being able to digitise records and automate some processes benefited insurers, the labour-saving and innovation ended there, leaving plenty to be desired.

This limited mindset around building core system architecture for protection insurers permeated into the setup of policy records. The result? Most systems can either only handle group records or individual records.

Old Tech Can Only Solve Old Problems

Characteristics like siloed data and policy-centric setups are what hinder outdated systems from solving today’s insurers’ biggest issues.

For instance, policy-centric setups cause data to exist in silos, making it difficult for information to pass from one silo to another. This keeps insurers from offering seamless experiences for individuals who have two different coverages because there tend to be two separate customer records, one for each policy type.

An Evolved System That Supports Evolving Needs

Increasingly, more employers are expanding group protection packages to include a multitude of standard protection policies, along with new products that may be fully employee-paid. With old systems, this would be really difficult to offer.

A customer-centric architecture, on the other hand, focuses policies around customers instead of the other way around. This allows insurers and customers to work within a single platform, where they can select an individual’s protection products and easily manage the group versus individual dynamics, whether in policy or billing.

A Simple Experience That’s Simply Better

When it comes to the capability disparity between coretech and modern legacy platforms, providing a single-platform experience is just the tip of the iceberg.

A core platform like EIS helps insurers consolidate platforms, keeping user experiences simple and streamlined.

Still exploring your options? Sign up for our bite-size newsletter to learn how to nitpick the best coretech for your business without the influence of biased opinions.

The post Why Combine Group & Individual Policies Onto a Single Platform? appeared first on EIS.

The post Why Combine Group & Individual Policies Onto a Single Platform? appeared first on EIS.

Unlike outdated legacy systems, this architecture helps overcome data silos and pave the way for agile, personalised customer interactions linked to significant life events. In turn, this gives you the power to redefine how you do business, increase customer loyalty, and reduce churn.

Not-So-Modern Legacy Systems

Despite their name, “modern” legacy platforms offer antiquated customer experiences. 

In these systems’ policy-centric setups, data is stored in silos, making it difficult for data to pass from one silo into another, or to be used across different functional areas. This makes it difficult for customer data collected in one area to improve or personalise customer experience in another area, unless it’s somehow inputted a second time. 

While modern legacy platforms technically cover insurers’ admin bases for policies and insureds, they’re far from being event-driven, and rarely allow for rich personalisation or agility.

Event-Driven Architecture: A Game-Changing Platform Capability

Monolithic systems may be able to send out annual notices with links to coverage information and premium prices to meet FCA requirements, but they can’t serve up the automations and personalisations consumers need as they go through life changes; or suggest policy upgrades based on data held in the system.

But with modern coretech like EIS OneSuite, the architecture is event-driven and centered around the customer as the main record type. This seemingly simple difference in setup makes for drastic improvements in customer experience.

Rather than sending out cold, annual notices, an event-driven platform can act nimbly on data that’s newly entered or picked up by third-party suppliers. 

For instance, if an income protection customer gets married, has a child, or buys a house, your system can detect that life event and automate a personalised communication with a congratulatory message and a special offer for a higher coverage amount.

On the other hand, if a customer doesn’t experience anything life-changing in a given year, you can automate an annual notice thanking them for their trust and reminding them of their product coverage, sums assured, and associated premiums.

High Tech = Higher Customer Satisfaction

When it comes to the capability disparity between platforms like EIS OneSuite and modern legacy platforms, event-driven architecture is just the tip of the iceberg.

A core platform like EIS helps you personalise and improve customer experiences, increasing satisfaction and retention.

Still exploring your options? Sign up for our bite-size newsletter to learn how to nitpick the best coretech for your business without the influence of biased opinions.

The post How Event-Driven Architecture Benefits Protection Insurers & Their Customers appeared first on EIS.

The post How Event-Driven Architecture Benefits Protection Insurers & Their Customers appeared first on EIS.

Caruso’s leadership will focus on customer success by establishing a world-class services practice that leverages the collective talents of EIS Group, customers, and partners to quickly deliver high-quality insurance applications. Other areas of focus for Caruso include enhancing customer self-sufficiency with emerging training techniques, as well as lowering the cost and time needed to successfully implement insurance core systems through the application of innovative technologies.

“EIS Group has a 100 percent implementation success rate and a track record of providing state-of-the-art technology,” said Caruso. “Building from this solid foundation, I am eager to take EIS Group’s services organization to the next level by expanding our global partner ecosystem and by using technology, methods and resources to ensure everyone involved achieves success.”

Caruso joins EIS Group from Pegasystems (Pega), where he ran professional services and technical education efforts for the company’s insurance and healthcare divisions. Prior to Pega, Caruso directed and managed a succession of high-growth businesses focused on a range of professional services, including global software delivery, information engineering, management consulting, network management outsourcing, and business process automation.

“Helping our customers and partners be successful has always been, and continues to be, our number one goal,” said Alec Miloslavsky, CEO and executive chairman for EIS Group. “Jim has the experience to know what is necessary to implement high-quality software solutions in a timely fashion. With Jim at the helm, I’m confident the EIS World Wide Services team will continue to be a strong contributor to the overall success of EIS Group.”

The post Jim Caruso Joins EIS Group as Company Transforms World Wide Services Group appeared first on EIS.

The Celent Model Insurer Asia Awards are the company’s premier vehicle for recognizing insurers for implementation and utilization of technology in the Asia-Pacific region. The basis for AMI’s award submission was an enterprise technology modernization effort that included the implementation of EIS Group’s core administration software system—EIS OneSuite™.

As a division of IAG, New Zealand’s largest fire and general insurance provider, AMI writes business through a network of approximately 70 stores and two call centers nationwide. Prior to the transformation initiative, AMI’s business operations were limited by manual processes and a legacy system that had become expensive to maintain and incapable of supporting current and future business needs, including improved customer service and faster speed to market for new products.

The implementation of the new core systems enables the insurer to standardize processes across the enterprise, automate underwriting, streamline new business processing, reduce operational costs, improve the overall customer experience and modernize communications and self-service capabilities. AMI is working toward a full conversion of all in-force policies, and has thus far converted more than 50 percent of all customers and policies.

“The AMI core systems replacement with EIS OneSuite is an excellent example of how insurers can reap very broad and significant business benefits and competitive advantage from modernizing legacy systems while also establishing a robust foundation for growth,” said Wenli Yuan, a senior analyst at Celent and author of the report. “In the industry at large, due to the complexity of these projects, the probability of realizing these benefits is often quite uncertain. Consequently, few insurers have completed front to back modernization processes. This is what makes the AMI transformation praiseworthy.”

“We are very pleased to be able to congratulate AMI Insurance on being named a 2015 Model Insurer for the success of a project that shows true vision for the future of insurance,” said Alec Miloslavsky, CEO and executive chairman for EIS Group. “It is extremely gratifying to see AMI Insurance recognized with this prestigious honor for the hard work of an outstanding team, and for their ongoing success with core administration modernization that not only increases agility and scalability, but improves the customer experience as well.”

More information about the award is available as a case study in the Celent Model Insurer Asia 2015: Case Studies in Effective Use in Insurance report. A copy of this report featuring the AMI case study is available for download here.

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“This was a great success for Industrial Alliance,” said Pascal Lavoie, CTO for IAAH, who was on hand to accept the award, as well as a plaque commemorating IAAH’s recognition as first runner-up in the Insurance-Canada Technology Awards (ICTA) Core Systems category. “The IAAH and EIS Group teams worked well together to accomplish some extraordinary goals.”

IAAH’s award submission was based on a core systems modernization effort which minimized business process and customer disruption and also provided IAAH with a digital platform for business growth. A key component of the project was a semi “Big Bang” approach to migration which successfully moved 1.8 million account and customer records and 300,000 existing policy headers to EIS OneSuiteTM for policy administration, billing, claims and customer management. This comprehensive project was accomplished via Lean and Agile project management approaches which allowed for an iterative process that drove good design, efficient implementation management and rapid testing of the new system across IAAH’s auto and home products.

The ICTA program recognizes significant achievements by Canadian insurance and reinsurance companies done in-house or with the assistance of technology vendor partners.  All categories are judged by a panel of leading industry analysts, experts, editors and association staff with an eye toward innovation, benefits realized, and positive impact on overall company operations.

“Industrial Alliance is an important customer-partner for EIS Group and we are very pleased their project has been recognized by the Canadian insurance industry as a standout example of what you can do with technology,” said Alec Miloslavsky, CEO and executive chairman for EIS Group.

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While most insurers support multichannel interactions, many portal and mobile capabilities remain siloed and fail to deliver a coherent customer experience. True omnichannel capabilities, as delivered by EIS Group through CustomerCore DXP, go beyond multichannel access to unify online, mobile and contact-center channels, and to connect those channels—in real time—with core insurance systems. These connected capabilities ensure a seamless customer experience and help nurture direct relationships between insurers and customers.

“The omnichannel concept is an evolution of multichannel operations and is a crucial capability for the digital insurer,” said Mark Breading, partner and chief research officer for SMA. “The omnichannel world seeks a single view of the customer, as well as brand consistency across channels and platforms. Omnichannel solutions need to allow insurers to design an environment in which channel switching is transparent and seamless to the customer. At the center of this approach would be a unified digital platform that would support all channels and connect the channels to the core administration systems on the back end. This would bring interactions and information together to produce a different and better customer experience that fosters loyalty.”

CustomerCore DXP enables insurers to leverage EIS Group’s core administration systems to deliver the highest level of customer service and engagement via online, mobile, email, text, chat or voice interactions. Through CustomerCore DXP, customers experience a seamless transition between preferred channels and devices while engaged in any purchasing, billing, policy servicing or claims transaction. Leveraging CustomerCore DXP, insurers can provide real-time integrated access to agents and brokers, leverage location-based services, and provide emergency or claims-related services. All stakeholders benefit from real-time access to any information regarding customer accounts, products and processes via tight integration with the EIS OneSuite software applications—PolicyCore™, ClaimCore™, BillingCore™ and CustomerCore.

“CustomerCore DXP delivers a true omnichannel experience via a seamless flow of activities and transactions between channels. At the same time, it preserves the business context and state of transactions with reliable security and privacy safeguards,” said Fazi Zand, EIS Group senior vice president, products. “Leveraging CustomerCore DXP, insurers can avoid the adverse impact that disconnected channels have on customer relationships and retention. Now insurers can rapidly implement digital strategies, dramatically improving user experience for customers and agents while controlling sales and servicing costs, and avoiding expensive, redundant integrations to separate portal and mobile solutions.”

Improved access and a greater level of transparency into the insurance process for all end users are enabled via CustomerCore DXP by these key technologies:

• New-generation REST APIs that quickly and efficiently expose core system data and processes.
• A prebuilt set of mobile apps for customer, agent and vendor self-service that are easily configured to meet insurers’ company-specific needs.
• Context-aware, responsive design features that allow customer interactions to flow seamlessly from one channel to another while adapting functions and content based on the user’s authorizations as well as device capabilities and constraints.

CustomerCore DXP is a member of EIS Group’s CustomerCore family of products, which offers customer and account management, customer service, communications, marketing and sales support, as well as customer analytics.

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“This release in particular delivers tremendous ease of use and automation capabilities for the group and worksite marketplace,” said Anthony Grosso, vice president of product marketing for EIS Group. “The depth of the pre-configured insurance product content available now through the EIS OneSuite underscores the value and leads the way into the future of packaged software for group and worksite insurers.”

The EIS OneSuite is a modern core administration solution that includes PolicyCore™, ClaimCore™, BillingCore™ and CustomerCore™ modules. Via this release, EIS Group has further enhanced the full policy lifecycle support available through the EIS OneSuite for insurers looking to create and take advantage of internal operational efficiencies. This release also includes support for list, self and direct bill, as well as a fully integrated, end-to-end claims process, spanning notification to payment.

This release focuses on additions to the EIS OneSuite pre-assembled product library for group and worksite benefits, a comprehensive collection of pre-configured insurance products that further increases speed-to-market and enables internal efficiencies for insurers. Version 6.2 also includes enhancements to critical functionality inherent to the EIS OneSuite, including:

• Census import and validation tool;
• Renewal and cancellation processing;
• Internal controls and regulatory compliance tools; and
• Integrated document generation.

To increase customer self-sufficiency, EIS OneSuite software also includes pre-built integration with an advanced, Excel-based rating tool that allows near real-time rate changes by business users. This tool creates efficiencies and accuracy within pricing of policies while helping to ensure compliance.

“The level of automation and efficiency that insurers can achieve through the EIS OneSuite is dramatically improved when users are able to use our pre-configured content as a platform for reducing product development cycles to rapidly respond to market changes,” said Grosso.

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“One of the primary drivers of core policy administration replacement for P&C insurers is the need to improve speed to market,” said Matthew Josefowicz, president and CEO of Novarica, a research and advisory firm focused on insurance technology strategy. “Systems with out-of-the-box content can be a key factor in delivering insurers a market advantage.”

EIS OneSuite, a modern core administration solution for policy administration, billing, claims and customer engagement, is designed to reduce the risk of a core system replacement by providing insurers out-of-the-box insurance processing capabilities with complete lifecycle transactional management. Via Pre-Configured Solution Packages, EIS OneSuite further leverages pre-assembled insurance products and modifiable, product definitions, related processes and interfaces to achieve rapid, efficient product deployments, improved operational efficiency through pre-built automation, greater ease of use, and simplified future software upgrades.

EIS OneSuite Version 6.2 features additional enhancements to improve processing accuracy and productivity, including:

• Optimized user experience;
• Greater configurability of billing rules;
• Improved single event/multiple claim management; and
• Enhanced commission strategy and plan management.

With this release, EIS Group also introduces plug-and-play reinsurance integrations. In Version 6.2, a new configurable interface allows reinsurance to be integrated directly into the underwriting process by supporting all the workflows required for open integration to external reinsurance software solutions. Benefits include reduced implementation timeframes and better risk management overall.

“Today’s insurers are faced with unprecedented levels of competition and customer expectations,” said Anthony Grosso, vice president of product marketing for EIS Group. “These dynamics are requiring core systems to be fully functional while also being flexible enough to support evolving business initiatives. Version 6.2 of the EIS OneSuite meets those requirements and marks an important step forward in the future of core administrative software where business users are empowered to advance strategic innovations for their companies.”

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State will deploy EIS OneSuite applications, PolicyCore™, BillingCore™, ClaimCore™ and CustomerCore™ as a new digital insurance platform for improved customer servicing and greater operational efficiency. State currently manages over a million policies for more than 460,000 customers.

State is undergoing a transformation from a distribution model that currently includes walk-in branches to an all-direct customer model for its personal and commercial lines of business. The company needed a solution to replace legacy software and manual processes, and one that removed barriers to customers adopting digital channels. It sought a proven, modern, flexible solution with built-in products and automated workflows, an integrated customer data model, and omni-channel capabilities for anywhere, anytime customer engagement.

“Insurance has become a 24/7 operation,” said Craig Olsen, executive general manager for State. “Our customers are rapidly embracing call center and online mechanisms to discuss their insurance needs, make claims and pay bills and State excels in servicing through these channels. Our selection of EIS OneSuite significantly enhances our ability to deliver a market-leading customer experience. It also enables innovation in product and underwriting operations, improved claims management and more cost-efficient back office and IT operations.”

EIS OneSuite will provide State several business benefits, including:

• An integrated, real-time view of customer information that improves customer service response and effectiveness;
• Seamless handoff between channels—such as online, mobile and call center—for all types of interactions;
• Faster speed-to-market for product and pricing changes;
• Automated underwriting capabilities that streamline new business and policy servicing processes;
• Business process management (BPM) that reduces process cycle-times and transaction costs;
• Optimized claims handling to speed claims settlement and decrease loss costs;
• Business intelligence (BI) and reporting that supports continuous business performance improvement; and
• Easy integration with real-time and predictive analytics capabilities to improve risk selection and pricing.

“We are honored to be the core systems provider behind State’s business transformation initiative,” said Alec Miloslavsky, CEO and executive chairman for EIS Group. “With EIS OneSuite, State will be equipped with the leading-edge technology needed to drive innovation in customer engagement, products and processes while reducing costs and increasing efficiency. We welcome State as a new EIS Group customer and look forward to working together to achieve their goals.”
For more information about this implementation, EIS Group or EIS OneSuite, please contact Kevin Haydon, marketing and communications manager for EIS Group, at +1.845.797.2976 or khaydon@eisgroup.com, or visit the company website at www.eisgroup.com.

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Founded in 1986, today Prestige is Japan’s largest roadside service provider. Prestige also provides claim adjudicating and management services for auto manufacturers offering extended warranties on new and used vehicles. In developing a business case for this technology initiative, the company cited low levels of automation, manual processes and legacy workarounds as causing an increase in the cost of providing claim adjudicating services for automobile extended warranty products in particular.

“While we were obviously looking for operational efficiencies, we knew this system modernization would also cut down on claim management costs for our auto manufacturer clients,” said Shinichi Tamagami, president and CEO of Prestige. “Automated adjudication has been a success for us so far. The new solutions integrate seamlessly with dealer systems, allow single sign-on for claim submissions, and are already reducing our operational cost.”

Prestige has deployed ClaimCore to a single auto manufacturer represented in Japan by over 400 dealers and more than 3,000 users. PolicyCore and CustomerCore have also been implemented successfully at Prestige to power behind the scenes workflows that support the outward-facing processes provided by ClaimCore. This modernization project also involved the deployment of a dealer portal. The modern, integrated technology behind the EIS OneSuite has ensured a quick adoption rate by Prestige staff, customers and partners, and speaks to the ease of use of the solutions.

“We are very pleased with the rapid success Prestige is experiencing,” said Rick Koo, SVP of product management for EIS Group. “We are looking forward to working with Prestige in the future as they take this model to other auto manufacturers and insurers in Japan.”

The EIS OneSuite is designed for, and deployed in, global markets, and seamlessly supports multi-language and multi-currency operations. The Prestige implementation and subsequent deployment marks the first localization of the EIS OneSuite in Japan.

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“Insurance companies trying to compete in today’s benefits market are facing more than just dramatic changes in distribution channels,” said Robert McIsaac, principal, Novarica. “New enrollment systems and processes, the transition from traditional group benefits to plan-member specific voluntary offerings, coupled with consumer demands for better product availability and pricing, means insurers need to address their core systems by introducing modern, open technology which will positively affect the product manufacturing and deployment cycle, create seamless interactions to the outside world, and bring all of the data back in to support operations.”

The EIS OneSuite 6.1 for Group and Voluntary Benefits provides a flexible administration platform for group, voluntary, and worksite benefits that can be deployed as an integrated suite or as standalone modules in the cloud or on-premise. Designed to seamlessly connect to multiple enrollment systems, the EIS OneSuite 6.1 is built on an open platform that allows maximum integration opportunities with exchanges, portals, mobile applications and call centers.

“We feel this release comes at a critical juncture for the benefits market,” said Anthony Grosso, vice president of product marketing and strategy for EIS Group. “The extended capabilities within this release will help insurers navigate the changing marketplace with an evergreen solution that addresses not only today’s challenges, but the continuing evolution necessary to handle tomorrow’s needs as well.”

Featuring a library of line-of-business (LOB) specific products and processes, the EIS OneSuite 6.1 also includes a full complement of configuration tools that can extend the solution without expensive development of custom code. Additionally, the EIS OneSuite 6.1 features capabilities which will help insurers improve top line results and lower operational costs, with functionality that includes:

• Recordkeeping from group to individual;
• Guarantee issue and individual underwriting;
• Library of pre-configured product accelerators;
• Single database with reuse of data from quote to claim;
• Ability to bill groups or individuals;
• Claims supported by world class workflow and rules; and
• Open technology built to connect with external systems.

“We are emboldened by the incredible response the EIS OneSuite has received so far from the industry,” said Grosso. “It is clear that success in this dynamic marketplace requires robust technology that supports both group and individual options, enables rapid development and deployment of new products when and where consumers want them, and drives the operational efficiencies needed to improve the bottom line.”

For more information about this release, EIS Group, or the EIS OneSuite for Group Benefits specifically, please visit the company website at www.eisgroup.com/benefits, or connect with EIS Group at the LIMRA Group Benefits and Worksite Conference at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront in Baltimore, MD, September 3-5, 2014.

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“Reaching one million policies in force on our new policy administration and billing platform is a very significant accomplishment for CSAA Insurance Group and for EIS Group,” said Steve O’Connor, chief information officer for CSAA Insurance Group. “Replacement of our legacy policy systems in particular is a cornerstone of our technology modernization initiative, and a critical component of our overall business transformation strategy. It is enhancing our ability to provide customers with great products, exceptional service and competitive pricing at a lower operating cost.”

“From the beginning of the project, CSAA Insurance Group invested in best practices, change management, and top-notch leadership to mitigate the risks of this large project,” said Scott Hunt, general manager of policy administration system transformation for CSAA Insurance Group. “Consequently, we have been able to take full advantage of the new generation of business capabilities, advanced technology and scalability built into the EIS Group solutions. The conversion of policies from legacy systems to the new systems using the EIS Group conversion toolset has also been a critical success.”

CSAA Insurance Group’s technology modernization initiative includes replacement of multiple legacy core systems and the installation of a scalable framework for large volume growth. EIS Group’s PolicyCore and BillingCore solutions, were deployed in an enterprise package which includes rating, underwriting, policy administration, billing, operational analytics and reporting, customer relationship management, BPM, document generation, and content management.

“Hitting the million-plus policy milestone does not happen without sound technology and provider partner choices,” said Karen Pauli, CEB TowerGroup. “This achievement places CSAA Insurance in a select group of successful replacement projects running on modern core systems which benefit customers and the employees who service them.”

“We congratulate CSAA Insurance Group on achieving this major milestone and are proud to partner in their success,” said Alec Miloslavsky, executive chairman and CEO for EIS Group. “The project has been deeply collaborative and productive and we look forward to helping them complete the retirement of all their legacy policy and billing systems to gain the full benefit of one multi-line platform.”

For more insight into the success of CSAA Insurance Group’s technology modernization initiative, join Karen Pauli of CEB TowerGroup and Scott Hunt of CSAA Insurance Group for a special webinar on September 10. Registration information is available here.

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Mr. Reffitt currently chairs the IASA Social Media Subcommittee, a part of the Marketing and Communications Committee. He began as a volunteer with IASA in September 2012 and was appointed to lead IASA’s social media efforts in May 2013. Over his first year in that role, IASA grew its Twitter followers by over 100%, launched corporate LinkedIn and Instagram sites, and created a formal social media policy and process that enables IASA Chapters across the U.S. to directly leverage the power of the IASA’s social media feeds. He also participates in IASA’s Solution Provider Enrichment Committee.

Each year, IASA honors a new volunteer who stands apart in demonstrating a commitment to furthering IASA’s goals. Mr. Reffitt was formally recognized for his volunteer efforts at the 2014 IASA Educational Conference and Business Show in Indianapolis in June.

“Thanks to his contributions, we have worked social media into every aspect of IASA,” said Chuck Gunkel, vice president of volunteer development for IASA. “IASA’s presence on outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+ has grown substantially thanks in large part to Darin’s work as an IASA volunteer.”

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The award recognizes how an individual positions the role of CIO strategically within the company and is given to individuals who show leadership, innovation and foresight in their contribution to ICT and business. The New Zealand CIO Awards are held in conjunction with the annual CIO Summit, now in its eighth year, and judges are comprised of a committee of peers.

In making the award to Angland, the judges commented: “Following several major acquisitions and the significant impact of the Christchurch earthquake, the ICT challenge within IAG has been significant. Kevin has clearly brought a business focus to the role of CIO and has ensured that the ICT team has the culture and focus to deliver on the outcomes the IAG business requires.”

“The EIS Group team offers warm congratulations to Kevin on his well-deserved CIO of the Year honors,” said Alec Miloslavsky, executive chairman and CEO, EIS Group. “Kevin is a talented leader and visionary who has successfully led his IT team through the integration and modernization of core IT systems that resulted in greater business efficiency and growth. We have been fortunate to work with Kevin on IAG’s core systems replacement program and look forward to supporting the continued success of this initiative.”

IAG deployed the EIS OneSuite™ for policy administration, billing and claims management in September, 2013 for its AMI subsidiary’s general insurance business.

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Alec Miloslavsky, executive chairman and CEO, EIS Group, explains the new branding, “Over the last year, we have grown significantly and evolved as a company. We remain dedicated to the insurance industry and we wanted a brand that was a stronger depiction of who we have become as a company. We are committed to delivering systems that integrate superior technical capabilities with rich insurance functionality and offer platform sustainability. This commitment, embodied in the design of our new logo, helps ensure our customers are empowered to innovate for their policy holders now and into the future.”

Simultaneous with the launch of the new corporate brand, EIS Group also introduced the framework for the company’s development philosophy—Evergreen EngineeringSM. EIS Evergreen Engineering is a methodology and set of underlying principles designed to develop insurance core systems that can be installed today and remain current and relevant to the needs of the insurance market for the long term. This enables insurers to innovate in business model, product, channel and customer while maintaining continuity with their existing business.

Chuck Johnston, the company’s chief marketing officer, provided details on the approach, “Evergreen Engineering is based on a set of principles that include designing for a long system lifespan, maintaining a modern technology roadmap tied to enhancing general business capabilities, leveraging the power of the package in delivery and constantly working to reduce upgrade friction to ensure customers can readily take upgrades. Following this approach ensures our customers can run multiple business lines and multiple channels on the same system, easily run a million policies in the same image, share integrated customer data across lines of business, deploy on premise or in the cloud, and meet the needs of the global market.”

In the last year, EIS Group launched a product offering for the group and voluntary benefits market and doubled in size through the addition of new software development and services resources. The company also increased presence in Japan, Asia-Pacific and Latin America, opened an office in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and added development centers in China and Eastern Europe. EIS Group now provides insurers in six countries with the EIS OneSuite™ of solutions for policy administration, billing, claims and customer management.

EIS Group is exhibiting at the IASA event and has several company representatives in attendance. For additional information on solutions from EIS Group, visit booth #1212 at the IASA show or visit the company website at www.eisgroup.com.

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“Adding mobile capabilities to the EIS OneSuite enables our insurer customers to offer superior services, enhance customer satisfaction, reduce customer service and claims costs, streamline core processes and establish a direct communication channel with their customers,” said Siamak Sartipi, product executive for EIS Group. “During development of our mobility solutions, we established a future-proof platform which is ready for next-gen consumer technologies that could even include wearables.”

The new EIS Mobile Field Adjuster App enhances productivity and automates claim processes by enabling the field adjusters to:

• Manage daily tasks (times, locations, parties, etc.);
• Receive assigned tasks or picking from task queues;
• Attach photos, videos, voice notes and other documents to a task;
• Send automated reports back to the claim office.

The new EIS Mobile Self-Service App empowers policyholders to manage insurance activities specific to home and auto lines of business when, where and how they choose through:

• Context-based design for exceptional prioritization and user experience;
• First notice of loss (FNOL) capabilities;
• Personalized core administration, including My Claims, My Policies, and My Billing;
• Insurance ID display and share;
• Identification of nearby agencies.

The new mobile apps from EIS Group are fully-configurable by insurers, allowing complete white-labeling.

Future planned releases will further build on this new mobile platform to offer a true omni-channel insurance experience across the value chain and advanced features leveraging location-based services and push notifications. Scalable and secure, the EIS OneSuite now provides greater access for field personnel and end users to basic insurance processes, and introduces a new level of transparency into the insurance process for all stakeholders.

EIS Group is exhibiting and featuring the new mobility capabilities at the IASA event and has several company representatives in attendance. For additional information on solutions from EIS Group, visit booth #1212 at the IASA show or visit the company website at www.eisgroup.com.

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Industrial Alliance deployed Exigen OneSuite as the cornerstone of a technology transformation focused on quickly developing and introducing new products to its expanding distribution network and implementing multi-channel customer service. The company also wanted to simplify its operational processes and IT architecture and decrease operational costs.

“To accomplish a legacy system replacement of this size in just two years is an outstanding achievement,” said Industrial Alliance (IAAH) vice-president and project sponsor Sophie Duval. “The keys to success have been the comprehensive business capabilities and flexible design of Exigen OneSuite and the dedication of the implementation team. We are seeing significant benefits in terms of product agility in a very competitive market, staff and agent productivity and effectiveness, and superior customer service. We believe our selection and deployment of Exigen OneSuite positions us well for immediate growth and for future opportunities as customer needs and market conditions change.”

The new platform is currently in production for new business for nine auto and six home insurance products. Additional personal lines roll-outs will follow. In addition, 1.8 million account and customer records and 300k policy headers were migrated to the new system to allow for easy conversion of existing policy holders upon policy renewal. The conversion of the large number of customer records enables Industrial Alliance (IAAH) to effectively manage customer information and communications for both new and existing customers within one system using Exigen OneSuite’s CustomerCore solution for customer relationship and communications management.

“We are very pleased with the results of our new core systems roll-out,” said Pascal Lavoie, chief technology officer, Industrial Alliance (IAAH). “Our existing OS 400 legacy system was not capable of supporting current and future business needs, such as a multi-channel customer experience. Exigen OneSuite’s customer-centric design and the modern, highly-configurable and flexible architecture are key benefits. The workflow, work management and integrated nature of the end-to-end system deliver significant efficiency. The platform has already proven very resilient to taking software upgrades and great care was taken in the implementation to optimize it for self-sufficiency with an eye to lowering cost of ownership.”

User experience and reaction has been very positive. According to Stéphanie Séguin, the first IAAH P&C agent to sell a policy on the system, “It is easy to follow and use. It is very intuitive and fun; I think we finally arrived in the 21st century with this system. This is a plus for agents, for new employees coming into the business and for the company.”

“We congratulate Industrial Alliance for this successful roll-out. Throughout the project we have admired and been pleased to support its dedication to improving insurance operations through technology modernization that puts the customer first,” said Alec Miloslavsky, executive chairman and CEO, EIS. “We look forward to continuing to support Industrial Alliance’s goal of achieving business control of their core systems platform and effectively managing it as a multi-line platform for growth.”

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EIS provides core processing solutions for policy administration, billing, claims management and customer management that help insurers grow their business and increase operational efficiency. The company’s solutions have been adopted by companies of all sizes, across multiple lines of business, in six countries. EIS has large development centers in Eastern Europe, China and the U.S. The company brings global insurance industry experience and a track record of successful implementations to each project and works in close collaboration with customers for success.

Viriato Leao joins EIS to manage operations and lead business development in the Latin America region. Leao has over 25 years of experience in the financial services and insurance industries. Prior to joining EIS, he was responsible for sales and business development in Latin America at eBaoTech, and previously served as International CIO at Assurant Solutions, and as chief architect and CIO for Latin America at Citibank.

“EIS has based its business on providing technically-advanced and flexible core systems that meet the present and future needs of general insurers and group and voluntary benefits insurers in several global markets,” said Alec Miloslavsky, executive chairman and CEO for EIS. “Our increased presence in Latin America and Brazil, in particular, under the experienced leadership of Viriato Leao, will enable us to more directly serve the needs of this growing regional marketplace.”
“I am pleased to have this opportunity to bring EIS solutions to the Latin American markets,” said Viriato Leao. “The end-to-end capabilities of the EIS OneSuite and various deployment options, including cloud, will help insurers respond more effectively to the competitive environment and to develop efficient distribution alternatives. I look forward to working with, and assisting, insurers in the region to meet their business challenges.”

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The EIS OneSuite of insurance core systems software components provides insurers a comprehensive set of end-to-end solutions for legacy replacement. While EIS OneSuite is designed for interchangeable deployment in both on-premise and software-as-a service environments, customers benefit from software-as-a-service deployments by reducing their IT footprint, operational risk and time to market. Core functionality includes underwriting, rating, policy administration, billing, claims and customer and distribution management with optional document management and business reporting and analytics capabilities.
“EIS is among the very first providers of insurance core systems as software-as-a-service and for that reason is excited to announce that the EIS OneSuite is fully tested and enabled for deployment on IBM’s PureApplication Service on SoftLayer infrastructure-as-a-service, and is available via the IBM Cloud marketplace,” said Andrew deGroot, senior vice president global business development and alliances, EIS. “This neatly-woven combination of cloud optimized applications, platform and infrastructure is good news to mid-market insurers that are trying to manage IT costs and operations yet gain quick access to the best core systems capabilities to compete with larger more resource-rich insurers.”

The IBM Cloud marketplace offers clients access to more than 100 SaaS applications, IBM’s Bluemix platform-as-a-service with its suite of composable services, the powerful SoftLayer infrastructure-as-a-service and IBM’s rich intellectual capital and deep industry expertise. This single online destination with a suite of cloud services delivers a new buying experience for clients that enables line of business professionals to deploy new services faster; allows developers to build them with greater speed; and offers IT departments more creative, efficient and lower-cost ways to deliver these services.
To learn more about leveraging EIS OneSuite in the IBM Cloud marketplace and to get started, visit http://ibm.com/cloud.

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Chuck Johnston joins EIS from analyst firm Celent, where he served as research director, focused on insurance technology and business strategies, specializing in life insurance and group. He brings more than 25 years of expertise in insurance and information technology to the role of managing marketing and product at EIS. Prior to joining Celent, he held several roles at Oracle Insurance including vice president of Global Insurance Strategy and Solutions. He previously served in senior management roles focusing on go to market strategy and execution at Siebel and Callidus software. Prior to this, he was vice president and director of Insurance Information Strategies at META Group. Johnston also has held technology and business leadership positions at Phoenix Home Life Mutual Insurance.

Mary Anne Gillespie comes to EIS with over 30 years of multichannel customer engagement experience. She executed successful sales strategies and market growth in national and global territories for companies from start-up to $20 billion in revenue across a broad range of industries, including insurance technology. She previously served as executive vice president at TAS Group and vice president of Merchant Sales at PayPal. Prior to this, she was vice president of sales at Guidewire Software. Earlier, she worked in several roles at Oracle leading to senior vice president of Sales.

“The introduction of EIS OneSuite for Employee Benefits, built on top of the EIS OneSuite™, our end-to-end platform for multiple lines of insurance, has generated strong interest and demand for the solution in the group and voluntary markets and underscores the value customers find in the EIS OneSuite for Property & Casualty insurance,” said Alec Miloslavsky, CEO and executive chairman, EIS. “These key appointments of two highly experienced executives strengthen our executive team and equip us with great leadership to steer marketing, product and sales during this time of growth for the company.”

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“What EIS brings is a very comprehensive solution that allows us to undertake a full transformation of the way we do business,” says IAAH vice president, risk management, Sophie Duval. “Our customers will appreciate being able to conduct business with us in French and English via any channel in real time, be it phone, email or online self-service. Our staff will appreciate the end-to-end automation of everyday business processes that will save them time and reduce our operational costs. We see EIS’ pre-integrated policy, billing and claims solution as an opportunity to raise productivity and efficiency levels simultaneously across the enterprise.”

“This is a large systems implementation that is on track to deliver some significant increase of IT efficiency,” said Pascal Lavoie, chief technology officer, IAAH. “The configurability and flexibility of the EIS system will provide us greater self-sufficiency than usually found on comparable systems. We have a very talented IT and business operations staff, and we want to be able to benefit from their ability to directly upgrade, develop and manage products and processes without always turning to a solution vendor’s support staff. In addition, the EIS system replaces an aging legacy OS 400 system that is difficult and time-consuming to modify for new products or processes.”

Industrial Alliance will roll out both home and auto products for new business initially. Simultaneously, three million account and customer records, policy headers and recent quotes for both home and auto will be migrated to the new system. Industrial Alliance will be able to manage marketing communications to the large contact database using Exigen OneSuite’s new integrated CustomerCore™ module for customer relationship and communications management.
Exigen OneSuite will provide Industrial Alliance several business benefits, including:

• An integrated view of customer information across its core operations that improves customer service response and effectiveness
• A highly configurable tool to accelerate product development
• Self-service portals for customers and for agents
• On demand multi-lingual engagement of customers
• Automated underwriting capabilities that streamline new business and policy servicing processes
• An optimized claims handling system that eliminates many manual processes so that staff can focus on serving customers
• Business intelligence and monitoring tools that track all system activity to provide business performance benchmarking, reporting, dashboards and activity-based costing

“Helping Industrial Alliance with their transformation initiative is an exciting opportunity that has motivated both the EIS and Industrial Alliance teams in a strong and productive partnership,” said Alec Miloslavsky, CEO and executive chairman, EIS. “When we have completed implementation, Industrial Alliance will achieve their goal of gaining unsurpassed business control of their core systems and effectively managing it as a multi-line platform for growth.”

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The flagship product of EIS is the Exigen OneSuite™, which provides insurance companies end-to-end core processing for policy administration, billing, and claims management, along with tools and management options supporting business changes. The company’s solutions are easy and quick to implement and assimilate, and can be expanded to suit changing organizational needs.

Under the agreement, Matrix will be responsible for marketing and distributing the solutions to insurance companies in Israel, and for supplying assimilation services, professional consultation, support, and service.

According to Jonatan Rosenthal, department manager in the software products division at Matrix, “the solutions offered by Exigen Insurance Solutions are an excellent response to the needs and challenges of companies involved in the world of insurance, providing solutions that are flexible and quick to implement, and enabling them to cope successfully with the dynamic nature of the market and the demands of regulation. At the same time they offer the possibility of creating a unique user experience and implementing client-focused systems, through which it is possible to increase the profit line and revenues of the organization, while also achieving operational and business efficiency.”

Rosenthal added that “the combination of solutions from Exigen Insurance Solutions and the know-how, abilities and experience of Matrix, including its familiarity with the market and the needs of the insurance companies in Israel, are significantly good news for companies in the field.”

“We are very pleased to enter into an agreement with Matrix to provide both sales and delivery capabilities in Israel,” said Andrew DeGroot, senior vice president for global business development and alliances at EIS. “Ensuring the success of each customer implementation is the top priority for us at EIS. Therefore the regional and industry expertise Matrix brings to the partnership will allow us to both offer exceptional service and grow our business in a vibrant market.”

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“We are very pleased with the results of the roll-out of our auto product. The new system streamlines operations and removes manual processes, particularly in claims servicing. Platform performance and reliability has been flawless also,” said Allan Dornan, COO of IAG. “Modernization of our core enterprise systems is vital to achieving the high levels of service we promise our customers. The new platform will enable AMI to quickly and cost-efficiently introduce new products and provide a better customer experience that makes it easier for customers to interact with us using the channels they prefer.”

AMI launched 23 classes of motor insurance on the Exigen platform, including private vehicle, commercial vehicle, motorcycle, motorhome and caravan. The modernization project required replacement of in-house built legacy core systems and the installation of a modern framework. The Exigen OneSuite component solutions – PolicyCore™, BillingCore™ and ClaimCore – were deployed in an enterprise package that also includes product development, distribution management, rating, underwriting, business intelligence and reporting, customer relationship management, business process management (BPM), document generation, and content management.

“Our existing legacy system, built 30 years ago, has become cost prohibitive to maintain and is not capable of supporting current and future business needs, such as a multi-channel customer experience that includes online and mobile self-service,” said Dornan. “Exigen has been a strong partner through a project heavily impacted by the Christchurch earthquake, where AMI was headquartered, and the subsequent sale of AMI to IAG and regulatory overhaul of property insurance in New Zealand.”

“The key features of the Exigen system driving benefit for us are the customer-centric design and the modern, highly-configurable and flexible architecture,” added Dornan. “Configurability allows us to bring new offerings to the market more quickly. The workflow, work management and integrated nature of the system deliver significant efficiency. In addition, the use of quality, inexpensive commodity hardware versus older proprietary mainframe technology is a substantial cost benefit.”

“For the Exigen team there is special satisfaction in seeing AMI successfully launch its new core systems platform. It is testimony to the resilience and determination of AMI staff and leadership to prevail in the wake of a devastating natural disaster. It is an inspiration to us,” said Alec Miloslavsky, executive chairman and CEO of Exigen. “We are looking forward to helping AMI continue its modernization and strengthen its position as a leading brand.”

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“The Exigen Pre-configured Solution Package is attractive software that gives several upfront advantages and some long-term benefits,” said Steve O’Connor, chief information officer for the Insurance Group. “We expect it to reduce the typical time it takes us to introduce individual state property insurance products and we plan to adapt it using in-house resources to meet the needs of the insurance company’s partners. Also, we anticipate a fast upgrade path for the product with a process we will be able to manage internally.”

Exigen Pre-configured Solution Package comes with a high degree of pre-configuration of product, processes and interfaces out-of-the-box. The key benefit for insurers is the large reduction in solution customization requirements that results in rapid and efficient product deployments and solution version upgrades. CSAA Insurance Group provides AAA-branded property lines insurance to more than 17 million AAA members in the 23 states served by the insurance company. CSAA Insurance Group has already implemented and is rolling out auto products for its partner states on the Exigen core systems platform.

“We are excited that CSAA Insurance Group has selected Exigen for its property lines business in addition to its ongoing auto lines roll-out,” said Alec Miloslavsky, executive chairman and CEO, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “As the first customer of our pre-configured property solution, we look forward to helping them quickly enhance and grow their property lines operations.”

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“Insurers in the Caribbean and globally are seeking much more than process improvement or productivity enhancement when they launch large technology uplifts today. They are transforming their organizations from end to end to become exponentially more agile and customer-centric,” said Lee Fogle, SVP, global sales, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “This means developing more new products, launching these innovations quickly, developing intricate pricing strategies and delivering consistent, excellent service across a wide range of channels and touch points. This is where Exigen comes in, with a solution that combines powerful core processing and business optimization software pre-integrated with a cloud-based platform.”

“Caribbean insurers have special requirements when considering replacing their core systems. They need flexible systems that support a wide variety of products operating on a single platform that delivers 24/7 support,” said Michael Armstrong, CEO of ILLUMINAT (Barbados) Limited. “Many systems in use today were designed for a pre-Internet era. They simply do not have the configurability, flexibility or capabilities to keep pace with modern market demands. Exigen OneSuite delivers world-class, flexible core systems and ILLUMINAT provides the regional system implementation expertise. We look forward to helping our Caribbean clients take advantage of this robust solution.”

Caribbean insurers also require strong reinsurance capability, which is handled in Exigen OneSuite through a powerful integrated partner component.
The Exigen OneSuite™ trio of components – comprised of PolicyCore™, BillingCore™ and ClaimCore™ – handles all core operations for general insurers. Unlike many competitive offerings, however, the Exigen OneSuite also includes all of the other capabilities general insurers need to manage and optimize operations, including workflow and business process management, document generation, content management, business analytics and CRM. It is offered in multiple deployment options, including on-site, hosted or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This makes the suite ideal for deployment on IBM PureSystems, a family of expert integrated systems that redefine how enterprise-level IT solutions are designed and implemented.

IBM PureSystems are built for the cloud, and “scale in” with integrated provisioning, elasticity and virtualization that improves efficiency and reduces costs. Exigen Insurance Solutions is a member of IBM PartnerWorld, additionally ILLUMINAT is an advanced member of IBM PartnerWorld and authorized reseller of IBM hardware and software including the PureSystems platform.

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Exigen Pre-Configured Solution Packages reduce core system replacement risks for insurers, and are designed to generate up to 50 percent savings in time and 40 percent savings in average costs. Exigen Pre-Configured Solution Packages use the extensive configuration capabilities of the Exigen OneSuite™ multi-line platform for policy administration, billing and claims management to reduce the technology and business risks associated with core systems replacement.
“The history of core systems replacement for insurers tells us that a decision to acquire a software package can be a risky proposition,” said Alec Miloslavsky, executive chairman and CEO, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “Only 20 percent of projects deliver on time and within budget. This is largely because many projects are still heavily reliant on software code customization to deliver promised functionality, as opposed to rich, underlying base code supported by extensive configuration capabilities. Insurers can run their companies on what we provide in our base pre-configured solutions.”

This new offering from Exigen provides insurers a system with the highest level of implementability and upgradeability. Insurers need only determine minimal changes to the working Pre-configured Solution Package to tailor the system to their specific situation, or adopt the pre-configured option as is. This significantly reduces the typical cost, time and risk of deployment of a traditional systems replacement. Typical upgrades can be accomplished in two months, and can even be performed during the implementation itself.

“Future system upgrades following initial implementation can be extremely difficult, often taking six to 18 months, and sometimes costing amounts that look more like initial implementation than an upgrade,” said Miloslavsky. “This has resulted in many companies being several versions behind the most current version of the vendor’s software. Exigen Pre-Configured Solution Packages lay these concerns to rest for insurers.”

“Carriers looking at new systems often focus on the extent of functionality available out of the box. But just as important as those lines of business and functionality already built within the system is the relative ease with which additional capabilities can be added,” said Karlyn Carnahan, principal at Novarica. “Carriers looking for speed to market look for pre-configured solutions and look for easily configurable rules, workflows, roles, pages, and forms.”
Implementing Exigen’s Pre-Configured Solution Packages allows insurers to manage the functionality, implementation, upgrade, cost of ownership and vendor risks characteristic of most package software implementations.

Initially, Exigen’s Pre-Configured Solution Packages are available for personal lines auto, home, dwelling property, and umbrella, and provide delivery of an out-of-the-box, fully functioning insurance processing system with complete lifecycle transactional capability. The design and underlying assumptions inherent to Exigen’s Pre-Configured Package Solutions are based on “best of breed” characteristics from Exigen client implementations and industry best practices. The package is offered with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) option, and portal/self-service capability, plus a built-in Interface Factory component providing pre-built integrations to standard data and third-party sources to accelerate initial system integrations and upgrades.

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CustomerCore™ is a comprehensive, insurance-specific customer relationship management (CRM) system with multi-channel integrated customer communication management (CCM). Its customer-centric design provides an optimal user experience with role-based interfaces for all types of interactions including self-service, such as Web and mobile applications, and contact center.

“CustomerCore sets the bar for insurance core systems packages,” said Fazi Zand, SVP, Products, CustomerCore and Commercial Lines, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “No end-to-end suite solution in the market today has the pre-integrated CRM and CCM capabilities that are now inherent to Exigen OneSuite. Insurers must typically integrate with separate off-the-shelf CRM packages at significant additional cost and implementation risks.”

CustomerCore™ enables insurers to:

• Manage sales leads and opportunities throughout the customer lifecycle;
• Maintain customer profiles of products and opportunities, contacts and relationships, and complete transactions history;
• Design and perform effective sales and marketing campaigns;
• Offer integrated customer service and communications across all channels and interactions; and
• Leverage comprehensive CRM analytics and customer value optimization tools.

According to Celent senior analyst Mike Fitzgerald, “When we ask insurance consumers what is important to them, ease and speed always rank high on the list. Traditionally, however, insurance administration systems are separated from customer management solutions, resulting in duplication of data, inaccuracy and delays. Combining these functions can increase coordination and reduce handoffs. As insurers increasingly compete based on consistent delivery of an innovative customer experience, tight integration will be required for success.”
The key benefits to insurers are:

• Increases customer affinity and mutual value of the relationship;
• Measurable improvement in the quality of the book of business and business performance;
• Reduces operational cost and complexity; and
• Increases sales effectiveness by recommending best fit products for new business and upsell.

The advantages of CustomerCore™ are derived from its ability to integrate fully with insurance core systems (including legacy and 3rd party systems) and extend insurance processes to multiple distribution networks and through multiple channels to support person-to-person, correspondence-based, and self-service modes of interaction. The system is context aware and adaptive, so the current state of a customer interaction flows seamlessly from one channel to another – as any policy, billing, claims or sales and service interaction progresses – while repurposing content and functions based on the user’s device capabilities and constraints. CustomerCore™ also provides complete virtualization of contact center operations, facilitating centralized operations management while allowing sales, service and claims representatives to work anywhere, anytime via the Internet.

“Commoditization and competition have put the focus on customer service and retention as key differentiators,” added Zand. “CustomerCore provides insurers the flexibility to refine customer experience in a holistic way in order to acquire loyal customers, and drive top-line results.”

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“As the group and voluntary insurance markets converge, changing distribution and service models will strain IT application architectures and legacy systems past the breaking point,” said Chuck Johnston, director, Americas Life/Annuity & Group Practice with Celent’s Insurance Group. “Insurers and brokers have underinvested in group and voluntary insurance solutions over the last 20-plus years, and will struggle to meet new market requirements. Celent believes that compelling new solution offerings in the group administration space will come from property & casualty (P&C) vendors leveraging their multi-coverage, multiple insurance object models to meet the unique needs of this market.”

Exigen OneSuite for Group Benefits provides insurers with a technology response to the business, regulatory and social drivers that are reshaping the Group Benefits market. The Exigen OneSuite offers plan management for group and worksite products – life, disability, accident and health, and medical – that accommodates all classes of participant and all billing options from non-contributory to voluntary. The solution provides insurers with unparalleled flexibility to manage product offerings and distribution across a wide spectrum of the market. Through the built-in customer relationship management (CRM) module insurers, worksite sponsor companies and brokers get a full on-line account view of customers. The solution also meets the growing demand by plan participants to view and manage their products online and on mobile devices.

“As a modern, configurable system based on open standards, Exigen brings a new option into an underserved market,” said Chad Hersh, managing director in the insurance practice at Novarica. “Few systems adequately address the unique needs of the group benefits space, including the robust flexibility and scale requirements. Market forces demand greater investment in technology as insurers seek to build more effective channels that market to employees directly, while dealing with the convergence of traditional group and voluntary insurance and customer desire for greater control over their benefits.”
Key features of Exigen OneSuite for Group Benefits include:

• A single multi-line platform for group and worksite insurance that reduces cost and provides greater control of distribution;
• A single view of the customer to improve service and increase cross-sell opportunities;
• Simplified eligibility and enrollment that saves time and increases accuracy;
• Flexible billing as a strategy to improve customer relationships; and
• Full real-time self-service for participants, brokers and sponsors.

“To date, Exigen has worked hard to provide P&C insurers of all sizes with a reliable and risk-managed path to achieve business transformation to future-readiness,” said Alec Miloslavsky, executive chairman and CEO of Exigen Insurance Solutions. “However, insurers in the group benefits market have been underserved by technology. Vendors have lagged in their ability to bring forth the newest and best technology. Exigen OneSuite for Group Benefits changes that by offering the first multi-line, end-to-end, core systems solution on a modern platform that is cloud and mobile enabled.”

“By consolidating disparate line of business systems into one and leveraging the ultra-configurability of Exigen OneSuite, we expect insurers to reduce operation and IT costs by more than 30 percent and to grow by controlling more of the value chain and being able to more quickly enter markets,” said Adam Denninger, SVP, Commercial Markets, Exigen Insurance Solutions.

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deGroot is responsible for the ongoing expansion of Exigen’s worldwide partner network, and for identifying, managing and maximizing the company’s alliances and growth opportunities. He brings more than 20 years of experience in business development helping companies successfully introduce their solutions to new markets, including EMEA, Asia-Pacific, and North America.

deGroot’s expertise covers core insurance systems, big data solutions, data warehousing, business intelligence and decision support solutions and other core applications critical to driving corporate results. He comes to Exigen from InfoTrellis, where he served as VP Sales, Marketing and Alliances. Before that he was with Symbility Solutions as head of sales and marketing. Previously, deGroot was General Manager, Canada for Guidewire.

“Andrew is a valuable addition to our leadership team who comes to us at a time when demand both in the US and globally for our solutions is growing rapidly,” said Gwen Spertell, president, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “Andrew is the right person to guide this market expansion and shepherd the partnerships that will help us to consistently deliver world-class product to customers worldwide.”

”With the pace of insurance core systems replacement quickening worldwide, open, scalable multi-line platforms are highly sought after,” commented deGroot. “Exigen is strategically positioned with pre-configured solutions and experienced resources and partners to execute the rapid business transformations insurers now need to compete.”

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Fogle has sales responsibility for the company’s enterprise solutions, including PolicyCore™, BillingCore™ and ClaimCore™, and software-as-a-service offerings worldwide. He brings 30 years of financial services IT executive experience to his role and a track record of building high performing sales organizations in both large and small companies.

Prior to serving as vice president at CSC leading the North America sales organization for P&C insurance, Fogle was senior vice president at Duck Creek Technologies managing its sales, marketing and consulting operations. Previously, he spent six years as COO of ISO’s Claims Outcome Division leading it to the dominant position in its market space. He also held sales and management positions with Policy Management Systems Corp. and was vice president of its claims products division.

“Lee is an industry veteran with the broad insight and market experience needed to lead our sales team and spearhead our market expansion,” said Gwen Spertell, president, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “He is keenly aware of what insurers need from their core system technology to grow their businesses and will make a major contribution to the success of our solutions and our customers.”

“The property and casualty insurance market is in the throes of an unparalleled modernization period and the Exigen core solutions are uniquely designed and packaged to enable insurers to succeed in their legacy transformations,” commented Fogle. “With so much market opportunity and capital riding on transformation initiatives the right system choice and the best implementation execution is essential.”

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The Insurance Exchange implemented Exigen’s PolicyCore™ and BillingCore™ solutions for its California auto business as the first phase of a larger replacement and integration project involving six legacy PAS and three legacy billing systems used by the Insurance Exchange. The Insurance Exchange offers personal lines insurance to AAA members through partnerships with AAA clubs in 23 states and Washington, DC. Nearly one million auto policy holders and 1.7 million cars in California alone are insured by the Insurance Exchange.

According to Celent’s Model Insurer 2013 report, the Insurance Exchange was chosen “for the best practices related to improved change and channel management, higher productivity and lower staff expenses, and use of standards for integration with other systems.”

“Recognition goes to leadership who identified the significance of targeted investments to enable agility and efficiency in our business by reducing complexity in our systems. Recognition also goes to those who so effectively executed the implementation by leveraging Exigen pre-configured solution packages and closely aligning business processes to standardized integration services. This allows us to rapidly add new channels and new products and services at reduced cost,” said Kim Bissell, AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah Insurance Exchange, IT Director.

The Insurance Exchange utilized a Change Management Office and Program to ensure that the 80% of the organization affected by the introduction of the new policy administration system would receive complete, accurate and balanced information about the changes. It established a strong change champion and support network consisting of managers and supervisors, super users, support processes and tools. This included the creation of a model office/demo/training environment to allow users the opportunity to get a feel for how the new system would work.

“Working closely with our user community allowed for an excellent user adoption rate and a solid, repeatable pattern for further state product roll-outs,” commented Tracy Tillinghast, AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah Insurance Exchange, PAS Business Owner.

The system roll-out experience exceeded expectations, says the report. Benefits include:

• A high user adoption rate at implementation of 60%.
• More than 2,500 staff members gained browser-based access with more than 1,000 staff using the system to quote, bind, and manage California auto policies.
• Policies on the new PAS can be sold about 33% faster than with the old system.
• Training new staff members is quicker because sales and service workflows and screens are the same.
• Real-time policy servicing is quicker and more accurate because there is a single view of the customer with cleaner and more recent data.

Other benefits include increased productivity with a single sign-on, comprehensive customer searches, pre-population of data in applications, and enhanced document management and servicing functionality.

“The story of how the Insurance Exchange applied a comprehensive change management approach to its core systems modernization with Exigen’s PolicyCore and BillingCore is a real world example of the effective usage of technology,” said Karen Monks, Celent analyst and author of the report.

“We congratulate the Insurance Exchange on this prestigious industry acknowledgment,” said Gwen Spertell, president, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “Their legacy modernization program is well thought out and has benefited from best practices throughout. It has been a great pleasure to be able to support the Exchange’s quest to deliver first-class customer service from an efficient and agile multi-line platform delivering pre-configured products.”

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“NBIC adopted a leading-edge approach to its core systems transformation and we are very pleased that its success has achieved high recognition in the industry,” said Gwen Spertell, president, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “They have led the way in demonstrating that modern core systems based in the cloud can provide a rapid-start platform for growth that easily connects to and serves agents, customers and business partners.”

In reviewing NBIC’s submission, Stephen Applebaum, senior analyst for Aite Group’s Property Casualty Insurance Practice, said, “An application that addresses a specific risk and delivers the service with very little inconvenience to the policyholder, and adds value to the policyholder, producer and carrier is a win-win-win. It is the application itself, designed to meet a specific industry risk that is innovative.”

“The approach taken incorporates some of the latest thinking and technologies,” wrote Best’s Review. “It represents one of the earliest deployments of insurance core systems placed in the cloud as Software-as-a-Service.” NBIC is one of 10 companies in the showcase recognized for forward-thinking among insurance organizations.

Headquartered in Rhode Island, NBIC offers specialty insurance products and services to homeowners through a select network of independent agents along the Eastern seaboard. Their recognition was for Project APEX, an enterprise architecture modernization effort that established a technology environment which enables exceptional client services, platform scalability, business alignment and product agility needed to transform the homeowners’ insurance marketplace. Exigen’s PolicyCore™ and BillingCore™ are core components of Project APEX that provide highly-configurable applications for underwriting, policy administration, billing, distribution management and agency and customer self-service.

Measures of success of Project APEX cited by Best’s Review include:

• NBIC is doubling written premium year-over-year
• time to issuance has been reduced by more than 80%
• distribution channel growth to over 6,500 agents and brokerage staff, including a high-volume direct writer call center
• anywhere, anytime access for agents on any mobile device

To read more about this innovation, visit http://www3.ambest.com/bestweek/getpublication.asp?issueid=9c3baaf9&pageid=22
Best’s Review is published by the A.M. Best Co. for insurance professionals, including home office executives, agents and brokers. Founded in 1899, A.M. Best Co. is the world’s oldest and most authoritative insurance rating and information source.

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The International Business Insurance product is available with PolicyCore™, a component of the Exigen OneSuite™ of core processing systems for policy administration, billing and claims management. The first client implementation is scheduled for the summer of 2012. The product was built within PolicyCore’s product management tool, Product Factory™, which allows insurers to streamline product development and management to meet channel demands and to respond to market changes for existing products.

The new product was designed in collaboration with experienced commercial lines insurance managers operating in multiple regions worldwide. Their input enabled the capture of a detailed set of product attributes and logic associated with coverages offered in Asia, Oceania, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe.

The introduction of an international business insurance product to stand alongside PolicyCore’s extensive personal lines product set is consistent with Exigen’s commitment to support the transformation agenda of global insurers. Customers gain product flexibility and also benefit from Exigen’s global software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployment of PolicyCore to rapidly and cost-effectively roll-out products from a platform that can serve multiple countries from a single data center and easily scale to market demand.

“The availability of an extensive business insurance product is an important enhancement to PolicyCore. It adds significant product options for insurers writing commercial lines in several geographies,” said Donald Light, Celent’s Director Americas Property/Casualty Practice.

“Insurers with a global presence face real challenges when trying to consolidate their systems and manage product offerings. Country-specific regulatory requirements, distribution models and business models create product complexity,” said Exigen Insurance Solutions’ president, Gwen Spertell. “Our goal is to reduce cost and complexity by providing customers the flexibility to do business the way they need to within one country while using the same core system and Exigen SaaS platform for multiple countries or regions.”

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“I am very pleased to welcome Peter to our executive team,” said Exigen Insurance Solutions’ executive chairman, Alec Miloslavsky. “He is an accomplished industry executive and leader who brings a wealth of global business experience. His oversight in critical areas of risk, finance and strategy will help drive organizational excellence. His insights into building value within the insurance enterprise will, in particular, give direction to our delivery of the business transformation execution so needed by insurers wanting to meet current and future market demands.”

Until March this year, Mr. Huehne worked for the Allianz Group and several of its subsidiaries. He served companies of the Allianz Group as a member of the board of directors, finance and audit committees. Since 2009 he was the president of Allianz of America and a member of the Fireman’s Fund executive and finance committee. Mr. Huehne has also served Allianz entities as CFO in Canada, Australia, Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company (US), Allianz of America, and the Allianz German Insurance Group.

As vice-chairman, Mr. Huehne has broad overall responsibility in the areas of risk, finance and strategy. This includes product pricing; oversight of financial target setting, planning, and third party management; interface to the capital markets; and insurance business outcome-based value alignment strategy.
“Exigen Insurance Solutions has a unique customer-focused business proposition for property and casualty insurance companies,” said Mr. Huehne. “This business model covers both the need for competitive IT solutions as well as optimizing the related expenses. The differentiated business model strategically and financially aligns Exigen and its customers through multi-year contracts way beyond the implementation of the IT solution.”

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“Mr. Zeller’s addition to our board brings even further industry experience and insight to a strong team focused on the exciting market opportunities for our growing and talented organization,” said Exigen Insurance Solutions’ executive chairman, Alec Miloslavsky. “The company will benefit directly from his growth-oriented, business-building approach. Willie shares our vision of technology as a creator of business value in the insurance enterprise and we look forward to his contributions and guidance.”

Mr. Zeller served as CEO at Hannover Re for 13 years. Under Mr. Zeller’s guidance, Hannover Re grew in standing from sixth to third largest reinsurer in the world. His strategy of efficient capital management, active cycle management and a focus on profitability made Hannover Re into the world’s second most profitable reinsurer. Prior to joining Hannover Re, Mr. Zeller was a member of the executive board of Cologne Re from 1977 through 1995. Earlier in his career, he served as the head of the Casualty Department and International Department Non-Life at Zurich Insurance Company.

Currently, Mr. Zeller serves as an independent director on the boards of Axis Capital Holdings, Deutsche Hypothekenbank and Towers Watson & Co. He and his former company have received numerous awards and recognitions from worldwide trade periodicals including Reinsurance Personality of the Year, Reinsurance Company of the Year (five times), the Innovation of the Year and Lifetime Achievement Award.

“Exigen Insurance brings a compelling value proposition to an industry in need of transformation,” said Mr. Zeller. “The combination of speed, quality, and value – underpinned by the company’s unique value-based, aligned business model for sharing the risk of large-scale technology modernization – addresses insurer concerns regarding rapid execution and longevity of insurance core systems.”

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“We are pleased with the results of the roll-out of personal auto in California. Technology modernization is a critical component of our business transformation strategy. It is enhancing our ability to provide great products with exceptional service and competitive pricing,” said Steve George, Chief Operating Officer, AAA NCNU Insurance Exchange. “Exigen Insurance Solutions has shown extraordinary commitment as a strategically aligned business partner to enable us to meet our goals.”

The project included replacement of multiple core systems and the installation of a scalable framework for large volume growth and was accomplished in a 13-month time frame. Exigen PolicyCore™ and Exigen BillingCore™ solutions were deployed in an enterprise package that also includes Product Factory™, DistributionCore™, rating, underwriting, business intelligence and reporting, customer relationship management, BPM, document generation, and content management.

“We chose Exigen Insurance for modern technology, flexibility, scalability and comprehensiveness of their solutions, and their reputation for implementation success,” said Steve O’Connor, Chief Information Officer, AAA NCNU Insurance Exchange. “Exigen’s on-time delivery proved how critical a fully open and service oriented architecture is to modern insurance IT development.”

“To complete a project with this level of complexity and deliver the business benefits in such a short time frame is unprecedented in our industry,” said Alec Miloslavsky, Executive Chairman, Exigen Insurance.

“We congratulate AAA NCNU Insurance Exchange for this successful roll-out. Its dedication to improving insurance operations through technology modernization underscores its strong commitment to members,” said Gwen Spertell, President, Exigen Insurance. “We feel honored to be providing a great organization like AAA NCNU Insurance Exchange with solutions that increase operational effectiveness and enhance business agility.”

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“Some insurance CIOs accomplish great things through the use of widely accepted technologies. Mike Anselmo is outstanding for his ability to prudently adapt leading-edge technologies before most of his peers appreciate their potential,” said Anthony O’Donnell, executive editor of Insurance & Technology. “In that respect, Anselmo has more than once shown the way forward for the industry.”

The annual Elite 8 award recognizes eight senior insurance carrier IT executives who have made an outstanding contribution to their company’s success and have demonstrated leadership, insight and innovation. Elite 8 executives are nominated by Insurance & Technology readers and other sources throughout the year and selected by a Consultants Advisory Board.

“We congratulate Mike on his Elite 8 award,” said Gwen Spertell, president of Exigen Insurance Solutions. “Mike is a strong believer in using technology to drive business value and he has the experience, confidence and vision to execute leading-edge projects, such as deploying Exigen’s policy administration and billing core systems as software-as-a-service. Mike also recognized the potential of Exigen’s unique value-based, aligned business model that allowed us to truly share the risks and to meet joint goals. We are proud to be able to contribute to his and NBIC’s success.”

Recently, NBIC was named a 2011 Celent Model Insurer in recognition of the business benefits and efficiencies derived from its policy administration replacement with Exigen PolicyCore™ and BillingCore™.

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“Karl Uphoff demonstrated an adventurous and entrepreneurial style early in his career both in technology start-ups and as a professional musician,” said Anthony O’Donnell, executive editor of Insurance & Technology. “His creativity and nose for technology’s potential led to the implementation of the Exigen-based ePCG platform at Chartis’ Private Client Group. Rather than take a piecemeal approach to modernization, Uphoff drove an aggressive, transformational approach that has supported double-digit growth at the high-end property/casualty business unit.”

The annual Elite 8 award recognizes eight senior insurance carrier IT executives who have made an outstanding contribution to their company’s success and have demonstrated leadership, insight and innovation. Elite 8 executives are nominated by Insurance & Technology readers and other sources throughout the year and selected by a Consultants Advisory Board.

“The Exigen team offers hearty congratulations to Karl on his well-deserved Elite 8 honors,” said Gwen Spertell, president, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “Karl is a genuine visionary who a decade ago could see the huge potential of new SOA technologies and industry data standards to create a new way forward to greater business efficiency. We have been fortunate to work with Karl since that time to help him craft an industry-leading organization and we are honored to be able to continue working together within an aligned business model to build on that success.”

Chartis’ ePCG technology modernization has also earned a Celent Model Insurer Award and top honors in the annual Vanguards in Insurance Practices (VIP) Awards.

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“Exigen PolicyCore™ distinguished itself as an industry leader in this report, demonstrating the broadest functionality available to the market and an advanced technology set that together delivers big business value to insurers,” said Ben Moreland, senior analyst in Celent’s insurance practice and co-author of the report. “Exigen should be considered for any insurer’s short list for policy administration system alternatives and provides the end-to-end solution with BillingCore™ and ClaimCore™ for insurers that desire one integrated suite solution for all their insurance process requirements.”

“Exigen provides a very robust and easy to use policy administration solution with PolicyCore for the personal lines product space. They are growing their customer base on the commercial side as well,” states the report. “All references gave high marks for the underwriting, rating and service desktop, workflow and document automation features and functions. Most other feedback was very positive across the remaining features and functions. One reference went so far as to state they ‘wouldn’t change anything’ about the product, and another stated that product management and knowledge of business were two of Exigen’s strengths above their competitors.”

Highlighted in the report is Exigen Insurance’s Aligned Business Model, which is its preferred license model. The model is outcome-based and ties remuneration to successful implementation and operation of the solution. “The Aligned Business Model is a clear market differentiator for us,” says Fazi Zand, VP, marketing and business development, Exigen Insurance. “It has proven to be popular with customers for its ability to reduce implementation and operational risk and cost, and to drive rapid implementation.”

Commenting on the award, Gwen Spertell, president of Exigen Insurance Solutions, stated, “We are delighted that Celent recognizes our leadership role in providing insurers with solutions that deliver wide and deep value to their businesses. We are very appreciative of our customers whose support and partnership has helped us to continuously improve and enhance PolicyCore as the market-leading, value-oriented option for policy administration system replacement.”

To download a copy of the full report on PolicyCore, click here.

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NBIC’s recent major technology modernization removed all core systems infrastructure from its Pawtucket home office and deployed it to its privately managed clouds. It rolled out Exigen Insurance Solutions’ PolicyCore™ and BillingCore™ as software-as-a-service with web-only access at the end of 2010. While NBIC did activate its home office disaster recovery process as power supply wavered, no fail-over portal, policy or claims systems needed to be brought up – they were always running. The systems run on global cloud computing service provider environments, whose operations were untouched by the hurricane, and even if they had been, redundancy protocols would have immediately kicked-in to provide uninterrupted availability.

“At the end of the day, when the storm passes, you want to be able to say there was ‘no impact to agent- or policyholder-facing services.’ Our decision to put our new policy administration system into the cloud as SaaS proved to be a good one from many perspectives, and right now the added value of built-in disaster recovery really stands out,” says NBIC’s CIO, MIke Anselmo. “While Irene caused power outages that affected our home office and our staff’s homes, our policy and claims systems remained available throughout the hurricane. If we had implemented our new core systems on-premise, it would have been very expensive to build out the necessary physical and technology infrastructure required, let alone create an additional disaster recovery site.”
Three days after Irene’s passage, says Anselmo, the SaaS core systems have scaled easily to accommodate a twenty-fold increase in online and call center activity.

“Redundant systems installed for disaster recovery purposes can be an expensive proposition for insurers,” says Exigen Insurance’s CTO, Michael Dwyer. “Exigen Insurance’s offering of Exigen PolicyCore™, BillingCore™ and ClaimCore™ as SaaS removes that headache for insurers. An additional benefit is elastic scalability. The SaaS deployment is designed to scale capacity as needed while disaster-spiked demand surges. It avoids the need to build and pay for over-capacity that insurers may or may not need. The Exigen SaaS offering is a complete in-the-box solution that also provides insurers the significant benefits of variabalized cost structure and risk sharing.”

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The localization features of Exigen OneSuite™ enable insurance company business users to seamlessly switch between languages depending on the business need and the markets being served by the system. At the click of a button, business users see all menu items, drop downs, page content and data fields display in the requested language as the system quickly translates not only the language but the resources of the insurance product itself. The extension of localization capabilities to Asian markets is in addition to Exigen OneSuite™ implementations in French- and Portuguese-speaking markets.

“The ongoing expansion of Exigen OneSuite™ localization to global markets is driven by clients that are seeking ease-of-doing-business from a single global platform,” said Rowshi Pejooh, vice president of product management, Exigen Insurance. “The ability to seamlessly change a complex core system from one language to another without having to log-in and log-out of separate systems represents a technology and service advantage for these insurers.”

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The core focus of the BillingCore™ v3.6 release is twofold: firstly, to improve the system user experience, resulting in a faster and more satisfying response to customer needs; and secondly, to expose more detailed billing data to improve both risk analysis and process and performer analysis. Powerful workflow and BPM capabilities help drive BillingCore’s continued development. Key 3.6 enhancements include:

• Extended rule-making capabilities
• More flexible payment plans and process automation
• Improved agency and billing management
• Enhanced agent and customer self-service
• Greatly expanded billing analytics and reporting through integration with Dynamic Analytics™, Exigen OneSuite’s new business intelligence tool

Version 3.6 of BillingCore™ includes the following features:

• Direct and agency billing, including single policy- and account-level billing
• Configurable role-based workspaces for different levels of users
• Flexible payment plans, including mid-term adjustment
• Dynamic installment schedule updating
• Multiple payment options, including EFT, credit cards, and mortgagee billing
• Web presentment of billing options to agents and customers
• Workflow management of work items moving between billing and other enterprise area
• Optional CRM and full integration to separate call center customer service tools
• Business user configurable bill plan rules
• Out-of-the-box and customizable billing reports for audit and control of billing transactions, receivables, and refunds
• Role-based Billing Dashboard and Billing Scorecard function

“Insurers continue to experience significant pain points around their billing operations. With customer service expectations rising, and high customer acquisition costs, they need solutions that create customer loyalty,” said Rowshi Pejooh, vice president of product management at Exigen Insurance Solutions. “In this significant upgrade of BillingCore™, we have worked with our customers and billing experts to develop user-centric enhancements that equip insurers with the all the tools to analyze billing operations and to create flexible billing plans and operations for a frictionless customer experience.”

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Nominations for the Best Practices Awards in the form of case studies were welcomed from the 192 companies listed in the 2011 VIP solution provider rankings. Nominees were encouraged to illustrate the role that ACORD data standards played as part of their business and technology success story. The awards were decided by Insurance Networking News (INN) editors, its editorial advisory board of industry experts, and Celent’s top insurance research analysts.

“The 2011 INN VIP Best Practice Awards challenged judges to select from an impressive list the “best of the best” case studies in terms of business benefit and quantifiable metrics,” said Ben Moreland, senior analyst, Celent. “Award winners emerge with the unqualified endorsement and acknowledgement of a jury of peers and experts. What impressed the panel about the NBIC nomination was the successful and pioneering deployment of SaaS core systems for legacy replacement and the strong results across the board, including such areas as new business quoting, operational efficiency and agency roll-out and adoption.”

“Narragansett Bay Insurance is honored to have been chosen as a VIP Award winner for Best Practices with Exigen Insurance Solutions,” said Mike Anselmo, CIO, Narragansett Bay Insurance. “We are grateful for the recognition of our successful technology modernization for which Exigen Insurance’s PolicyCore™ and BillingCore™ were cornerstone systems. NBIC is growing rapidly and this success would not have been possible without the SaaS deployment that got up and running quickly and the highly-configurable solution that gives us the business agility to quickly service customers and add products, states, and producers.”
Some key benefits listed in the nomination are:

• New policy and billing systems roll-out began within 13 months
• A two-thirds reduction in time for new business quoting
• A straight-through-processing increase from under 5% to over 75%

“Exigen Insurance congratulates NBIC on the VIP award,” said Gwen Spertell, CEO, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “We are pleased to be a part of NBIC’s success, and are honored to have our solutions counted among the ‘best of the best’.”

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The new and enhanced features within PolicyCore enhance property and casualty insurers’ ability to improve customer service, operational efficiency, agency/broker management and product agility.

“PolicyCore™ 3.6 has enhancements that appeal to customer-centric organizations interested in achieving differentiation through innovations in product, process and distribution,” says Rowshi Pejooh, vice president of product management at Exigen Insurance. “The common theme is providing insurers more flexibility, with transparency and control, so they can be more agile and responsive to customer needs.”
Areas of enhancement include:

• Product development: Rapid product development is key to business agility and market growth for all insurers and PolicyCore™ 3.6 provides enhanced support within Product Factory™ for collaborative product development, as well as efficiency improvements in product rules management that streamline and accelerate market expansion domestically and globally.
• User productivity: Insurers can find productivity gains through a number of Exigen Platform™ enhancements, such as the significant expansion of notes recording and management capability, including quick notes, search, spell check, and rich text support; the introduction of task management models with escalation and routing capabilities for handling manual tasks in business processes; and users can now simply drag and drop files from their own desktop system to the PolicyCore e-Folder™.
• Partner and book of business management: Insurers can broaden distribution channels and improve ease of doing business with the new Partner Scheme management tool, which manages all agreements with distribution partners – be they agent/broker, bank, retail or affinity organizations. In addition, enhancements to single and bulk agency transfer include inter- and intra-agency transfers, flexible search and preview, and lifecycle management of bulk transfer requests.
• Policy servicing: Insurers with call-centers serving multilingual clientele will have the ability to instantly switch from one language to another – English to French, for example – from within the UI.
• System efficiency: New configuration capabilities have been added to provide greater flexibility to manage taxes and fees at the policy or coverage levels. The new release also includes a more simplified way to handle non-premium bearing endorsements that saves an average of 50% in transaction time.

“The new release of PolicyCore™ has been well received by our customers who are excited by the possibilities the enhancements provide to give a revenue lift or drive more operational efficiency,” said Gwen Spertell, president of Exigen Insurance. “These enhancements demonstrate our ongoing commitment to providing insurers with more and ever-better configuration and solution management capabilities.”

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The solutions brought together by these two industry-leading providers solve all important challenges faced by insurers entering this market. The solutions are turn-key, satisfying all technology integration, data, actuarial, regulatory and customer communications requirements.

Exigen Insurance Solutions’ Exigen OneSuite offers modular, end-to-end core solutions for policy administration, claims, billing and account management. Exigen has a market-ready solution for the pay-as-you-drive automobile insurance market. The Exigen PAYD® solution enables insurers to rapidly implement a usage-based pricing auto insurance product with no impact to existing applications and business processes. Exigen PAYD can be delivered as software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or as a custom implementation.

The Evogi Group’s innovative Intelligent InsuranceSM delivers a UBI solution that capitalizes on broad insurance expertise in agency operations, insurer operations, modeling, and driver scoring. The solutions feature flexible modern architecture and telematics platforms that utilize Evogi’s or third party devices to provide comprehensive location based intelligence that enables, reporting and interaction with vehicles.

“The pace is quickening for entry to the usage-based auto insurance market. Insurers need to rapidly create innovative product offerings or risk losing customers to competitors,” said Fazi Zand, Vice President Marketing and Business Development, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “However, usage-based insurance presents new forms of handling and managing realtime data. Furthermore, the integration of telematics and sensor technologies represents new challenges for existing systems and IT resources. The union of the Exigen Insurance and Evogi’s UBI solution provides a complete, effective, flexible, and ready for market deployment alternative.”

“Telematics when tied to usage-based insurance provides insurers a host of opportunities to provide better policy pricing, risk management, claims reduction, and on-board services,” says Bob Neeser, Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing, The Evogi Group

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“Claims-management processes should be formed by an organization’s best practices, not by rigid, off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all software. With this powerful rules-driven enhancement to ClaimCore, insurers can configure claims user workspaces to their organization’s unique needs. Claim Factory gives claims management a design environment where they can configure loss-data collection processes to match their company’s operational objectives, customer service philosophy and regulatory requirements,” said Rowshi Pejooh, VP, Product Development.

Claim Factory utilizes Exigen Insurance Solutions’ unique “building block” design approach to provide complete reusability. All claims data fields are organized into building blocks that can be configured, extended and assembled to change existing or create new workspaces. With Claim Factory and ClaimCore’s embedded business process management engine, insurers can design and optimize their claims process to differentiate their customer claim experience from competitors.

Claims Factory improves claims management in the following ways:

• Business users can easily configure and build web-based claims workspaces for new and existing products and policies using “building blocks”
• Data-collection processes can be made more efficient and accurate
• Business rules and role-based permissions can be applied to all building blocks and functions
• Collaboration capability allows claims stakeholders to jointly design workspaces
• Extensive scripting capabilities accelerate training of new employees

“Our customers are excited by the flexibility and agility that Claim Factory gives them. For instance, when bringing on line a new call center with staff who are not experienced, it is a simple process to configure their workspace to limit the number of tabs and fields and introduce scripts and prompts that are intuitive and which speed claims gathering and accuracy. Insurers can then re-use and configure the same workspace to fit user needs and skill sets across different products, lines of business and markets,” says Jim Eva, claims product manager, Exigen Insurance Solutions.

Claim Factory extends ClaimCore’s ability to:

• Configure the order in which data is collected to streamline contact-center processes
• Create ‘tool tip’ contextual notes with instructions or scripts for any data-entry field
• Define business rules for acquiring and validating information
• Configure user workspace organization and navigation
• Set labels to match an organization’s specific claims terminology
• Track claims activity for accountability of people and processes

“Staying on top of a rapidly changing claims environment requires flexibility to swiftly respond to changing market and regulatory demands,” said Karlyn Carnahan, Principal, Insurance at Novarica. “The ability to easily add data elements, use those data elements in easily configurable rules, and customize user interfaces are critical capabilities for carriers looking to deliver leading claims capabilities for the future.”

“We are very pleased to bring Claim Factory to the market. Claim Factory extends the industry-leading configuration capabilities of the Exigen OneSuite to ClaimCore and enhances our clients’ business agility,” said Gwen Spertell, CEO, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “For insurers, having straightforward tools to devise efficient and responsive claims management can directly result in bottom line improvements.”

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“Our goal with Dynamic Analytics is to help insurers create a culture based on results and productivity by harnessing the power of information and analytics accessible at all levels of the organization,” says Rowshi Pejooh, VP, product development, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “It delivers the right information to the right people at the right time. Performance and transactional data is presented in out-of-the-box and customizable reports and operational and executive dashboards. Management can quickly and consistently evaluate the health of the business with pre-scheduled and on-demand reporting that might range from quote-to-policy issuance times in a regional data center, to sales conversion at a specific agency, to claims history in a certain zip code or hourly enterprise-wide policy sales numbers.”

“Another goal is to make business intelligence affordable. For insurers to set up their own data warehouse and analytics infrastructure separate from their core systems is an expensive proposition that can easily run into the seven figures. By building it into the Exigen OneSuite solutions PolicyCore™, BillingCore™ and ClaimCore™ our customers get a very significant value add that reduces their TCO and increases ROI,” says Pejooh.
Dynamic Analytics offers analytics on-demand with a high degree of flexibility. It provides analysis of outcomes and projections for every aspect of core operations, from policy, billing and claims to distribution. It also includes business activity monitoring capabilities for measuring the efficiency and compliance of all business processes. Other features include:

• Out-of-the-box definitive data warehouse schema that eliminates the need for carriers to design their own schema
• Out-of-the-box ETL that eliminates the need for carriers to schedule and maintain ETL jobs
• 50-plus actionable out-of-the-box reports related to policy, billing and claims and customer/party-centric activities
• Extensible custom report creation capability
• Out-of-the-box, self-service operational and executive dashboards
• Dashboards include predefined yet extensible key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Fast refresh and replication to support real time reporting

“Our customers are constantly trying to make sense of the mountain of data that their core systems produce every minute of every day,” said Gwen Spertell, CEO, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “Building business intelligence capabilities right into their deployments of PolicyCore, BillingCore and ClaimCore to offer them decisioning support is the logical way to approach the problem. It extends the value of their core system investment by removing the burden and cost of typical external business analytics software deployments.”

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Novarica ACE Ranking Report gave Exigen PolicyCoreTM a total score of 94 and the highest recorded ranking of 99 out of 100 for “overall customer satisfaction” for a property and casualty insurance policy administration system. Exigen Insurance customers completing the survey also gave scores of 96 for “technology” and 93 for “functionality”. The survey responses highlighted enhanced productivity, effectively addressing business problems, little to no service or performance issues, alignment to insurers’ business interests and all respondents highly recommended Exigen Insurance Solutions to peers.

“Exigen’s strong score for overall customer satisfaction is a testament to their customers’ high satisfaction levels with Exigen’s product and services,” commented Matthew Josefowicz, partner and managing director at Novarica, and lead researcher in the ACE Rankings program
The rankings are produced independently and are not sponsored by vendors. They are intended to provide a transparent, unedited picture of how well a solution or provider meets its users’ needs, says Novarica.

Gwen Spertell, CEO of Exigen Insurance Solutions, said, “It is very gratifying to the Exigen Insurance team that our customers scored us so highly on the ACE rankings. We place tremendous importance on developing both the technology and the customer partnership that allows a close alignment of business objectives and delivers industry-best outcomes. It is a high priority to us to match PolicyCore’s comprehensive functionality, configurability and flexible delivery options – including SaaS – to optimize business value for each customer.”

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“At AMI we believe our commitment to ‘Customer Care’ is the cornerstone of our success. For that reason, our search for a replacement for our legacy systems put a strong focus on finding the most customer-centric solution available. The Exigen Insurance solution is exactly what we were looking for; the AMI concept of Customer Care is embodied in its design. This modern platform will allow us to migrate efficiently from our legacy systems to deliver the highest levels of customer care and satisfaction while also creating operational efficiency and cost savings,” said John Balmforth, CEO, AMI. “We have chosen a system provider whose interests are aligned with ours through a partnership model that supports rapid deployment and long-term viability of our new systems.”

AMI currently services 1.1 million auto, home, contents, farm and boat insurance policies. Exigen OneSuite will provide AMI several business benefits, including:

• An integrated view of customer information and history that improves response time
• Enhanced ability to service policyholders as individuals, groups and organizations
• A highly configurable tool to accelerate product development
• Automated underwriting capabilities that streamline new business and policy servicing processes
• Business process management that reduces process cycle-times and transaction costs
• Elevated claims service levels that speed claims settlement and decrease loss costs
• Business intelligence and reporting that supports continuous business performance improvement

“Our in-house built systems have served us well but their design and structure no longer provides the flexibility we need to compete and grow. Exigen OneSuite’s comprehensive functionality and modern architecture are built on a new generation of technology that future-proofs our investment,” said Mr. Balmforth. “The solution’s modular but integrated policy, billing and claims capability will streamline system implementation. The highly-configurable product and process management will allow us to deliver more customized products to market quickly. Of most importance, our customers and staff will appreciate the systems’ ability to automate and synchronize all our distribution channels – online, call center, branch office and agency – and display a complete view the customer’s individual and group associated business.”

“We are proud that AMI has selected Exigen OneSuite to help it modernize to meet market demands. AMI is a top-rated insurer with an enviable record of corporate responsibility and employee satisfaction. We are committed to helping them extend their market leadership and reputation for great products and service,” said Gwen Spertell, CEO, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “Implementation has begun and working in partnership with the AMI team we look forward to successful completion of this major modernization initiative.”

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Celent’s premier global awards recognize insurers cited in the firm’s Model Insurer 2011 report. The report offers some key best practices in the effective use of technology that a “model insurer” would use, says Celent.

NBIC implemented Exigen PolicyCore and BillingCore, deployed as software-as-a-service (SaaS), as the cornerstone of its enterprise technology modernization to enable it to improve ease of doing business with its agent/broker sales channel, quickly enter new markets with new products to capture growth opportunities, and reduce business processing times and operational costs.

According to the report, NBIC was chosen as a Model Insurer “because of the best practices in enterprise systems legacy replacement for its improved channel management, optimization of infrastructure, and higher productivity/lower staff expenses.” The report acknowledges NBIC for “combining SaaS and aligned business models to speed implementation.”

“We congratulate Narragansett Bay Insurance as an example of a carrier with a vision of insurance in the cloud that now provides them a future-proofed technology investment with exceptional business agility and scalability,” said Gwen Spertell, CEO, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “NBIC has taken an innovative approach in both technology and partnership. Through our outcome-based, aligned business model, both Exigen Insurance and NBIC are deeply committed to the long-term success of this major technology modernization project. We are looking forward to continuing our work together to maximize the business benefits.”

The full report is available at www.celent.com.

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“I am very impressed by Exigen Insurance’s advanced approach to enterprise technology and unique ability to drive successful system modernization for customers through outcome-based alignment of technology and business goals,” commented Martyn. “It is a new and appealing paradigm for vendor and insurer partnership. Working with Exigen Insurance’s innovative team, I look forward to building on the company’s strong market momentum.”

Martyn brings over 25 years of industry experience to Exigen Insurance, including leadership positions with prominent insurance technology companies. As U.S. country manager and global head of software sales at Xchanging Global Insurance Services, Martyn led a team focused on expanding penetration of software applications across insurance, reinsurance and broking sectors while also serving on the management team driving direction for product strategy, marketing, solution delivery and customer service.

Prior to Exchanging, Martyn was president, North America, and managing board member for Rebus Insurance Systems, where he secured major contracts with leading national and multi-national insurers for enterprise processing solutions. Martyn came to Rebus through its acquisition of EPG Insurance Systems, where he served as the U.S. company president. Martyn holds a BSc (Honors) in mathematical statistics and operational research from the University of Exeter.

“I am pleased to welcome Martyn to Exigen Insurance as head of sales. Martyn brings deep insight into insurers’ business transformation needs that will help us match our solutions to a market hungry for reliable, customer-centric, high performance systems,” said Gwen Spertell, CEO, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “Martyn’s extensive domestic and international experience driving market share and profitable growth is a valuable asset to our management team as we continue our strong growth trajectory.”

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According to Kimberly-Harris Ferrante, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner, and author of the report “Replacing aging and legacy policy environments will continue to be a priority among P&C insurers during the next three to five years, based on Gartner’s assessment of the market and client interactions. Business changes will force insurers to adopt new processes and to offer new functionality that is not supported in current-day systems or that can be changed easily without code rewrites.”

Exigen Insurance Solutions’ research and development focus has been on providing insurers with thoroughly modern insurance core systems, based on an advanced service-oriented architecture, that deliver business agility. The solutions provide timely product and process innovation that support flexible distribution models in new or existing markets. PolicyCore embodies this approach as a highly configurable policy administration system with the most comprehensive functionality available in a modern solution. Rating, automated underwriting, product configuration, customer account management and CRM, integrated distribution management, business rules, business process management, document generation and management are all available in a configurable and scalable solution that offers broad business value to insurers. Insurers both large and small have implemented PolicyCore in on-premise, hosted and software-as-a-service environments to improve speed-to-market and service and to reduce costs.

“The Exigen team is proud to be included in this report,” said Gwen Spertell, CEO, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “We are pleased with the strong acceptance and market momentum of PolicyCore and its recognition as a new solution that solves critical business problems that are eroding the competitiveness of P&C insurers. PolicyCore, and its suite partners ClaimCore and BillingCore, answer insurers’ needs not only for process efficiency and cost effectiveness but also vastly improved product and service delivery.”

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Insurance IT All Star is an annual award recognizing senior insurance IT executives who have shown leadership and vision in their use of technology to support their company’s business goals. Recipients are drawn from the property and casualty, life and health, and reinsurance sectors.

“We feel it is important to recognize some of the outstanding people who work in insurance technology and Mike Anselmo certainly fits that bill,” said Robert Regis Hyle, editor-in-chief, Tech Decisions. “His technology and leadership skills certainly stood out among the candidates for this honor, but we also were impressed with his personal résumé. His interest in education and Junior Achievement illustrate a depth that not all business leaders exhibit.”

Anselmo started with NBIC in February of 2009. He previously served as CIO at Clarendon Insurance Group, Praetorian Financial Group and QBE Specialty Insurance. His first task at NBIC was to evaluate options. In June of that year, he presented a technology and operational transformation strategy to the board of directors and management team. The initiative is named Project Apex and it includes implementation of a new website and agency portal, data warehouse, and policy administration, billing and claims management systems.

“We congratulate Mike on this well-deserved recognition,” said Gwen Spertell, CEO of Exigen Insurance Solutions. “Mike is a visionary with the deep operational experience required to guide successful technology projects. It has been our pleasure to work with him to provide the Exigen PolicyCoreTM and BillingCoreTM systems as an innovative SaaS implementation with an outcome-based alignment and partnership between Exigen Insurance and NBIC.”

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PolicyCore is Exigen Insurance’s highly-rated policy administration, product configuration, and rating solution currently used by property and casualty insurers of all sizes to reduce operational costs and drive revenue growth.

The integration of ISO Electronic Rating Content completes PolicyCore’s support for personal and commercial lines. PolicyCore now supports any product, any line of business, and any distribution channel. The flexibility and extensive product and process configurability offered by PolicyCore allow carriers to rapidly add additional lines and volume as their business grows.

“We designed ISO Electronic Rating Content in response to requests for a solution that can jump-start initial development of personal and commercial lines products,” said Kevin Thompson, senior vice president, Insurance Services, ISO. “Exigen Insurance was among the first to ask us to provide the program because they realized their modern architecture, data structure, and product configuration capabilities would allow a faster product integration path for live rating data than traditional approaches. Manual analysis and implementation of the ISO circulars are unnecessary, and data quality is improved. The savings for insurers are significant, as ISO typically makes 3,000 to 4,000 program changes per year in commercial lines alone.”

At the center of PolicyCore’s new commercial lines capability is Product FactoryTM, an advanced rules- and tools-based product development and configuration tool. Product Factory accelerates product development through the reuse of existing product “building blocks.” The building blocks correspond directly with ISO rating data, and Product Factory users are able to collaboratively manage the product development process, including insurer-specific ISO product deviations. A product is composed of multiple building blocks, and only those affected by the new rating data require updating. Consequently, updates are substantially quicker than traditional methods.

“Our goal is to meet both existing customer and broader market demand for a state-of-the-art personal and commercial lines policy administration solution,” says Gwen Spertell, CEO, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “We recognized that a live stream of ISO commercial lines rating data was critical to our success and ISO was very responsive to our request. When ISO data is released, our automated integration tools will import it to our rating engine and product templates. With the combination of electronic ISO updates and the product configurability provided by Product Factory, we are able to bring a new value proposition to the commercial lines market. Insurers can get compliant products to market faster, easier, and more cost-effectively.”

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Smith brings a comprehensive knowledge of insurer operations to the new management role of VP, Client Relations. He has over 30 years experience in P&C insurance business and technology management. As senior vice president at California State Automobile Association (CSAA), he oversaw all aspects of a $1.6 billion personal lines insurance portfolio, including all actuarial, claims, and underwriting activities, together with product management, product delivery and customer service functions, through a workforce of 3,500 working out of 80 retail locations. He led major initiatives to streamline business operations and align technology for business growth. Smith has a long association with the American Red Cross, Bay Area Chapter, serving as chair of the board and later as chief public support officer.

“We are very fortunate to have a former insurance company executive of Greg’s caliber on our management team,” said Gwen Spertell, CEO, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “Greg brings exceptional people skills and deep insight into the operations of insurers to the task of engaging clients in the transformation of their businesses. With the strong growth we are experiencing in the insurance core systems market, Greg will play a pivotal role helping us provide an industry-best customer experience and a finely-tuned solution delivery operation.”

“Insurers have opportunities to use technology to drive revenue, improve customer service and reduce operational costs that were unimaginable just a few years ago,” said Smith. “It is very gratifying to be in a role helping insurers take full advantage of the new capabilities available to them in such an advanced and comprehensive core systems solution as Exigen OneSuite.”

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Kelly joins Exigen Insurance from Accenture, where she was a Partner in their Insurance Delivery practice. She has many years of experience delivering business benefits through implementation of multi-faceted programs impacting people, business processes and technology capabilities. In her twenty years at Accenture, Kelly has worked with a number of the top insurance companies to drive large, transformational efforts. She has proven experience in all aspects of the insurance lifecycle, including policy and product, sales and distribution, billing, claims and reporting.

“Nancy has a wealth of industry experience and is recognized for managing complex technology initiatives through the creation of high performance teams. We are very pleased to welcome her to our executive team,” said Gwen Spertell, CEO, Exigen Insurance Solutions. “Her combination of business and technology skills, coupled with her strong track record for successfully delivering projects will enable Exigen Insurance to continue to hone its implementation skills to serve its clients.”

“The Exigen OneSuite is a truly modern system designed to incorporate best practices in both architecture and insurance process management,” said Kelly. “This delivers real benefits in terms of ease of integration and configuration and I am looking forward to the opportunity of maximizing these benefits in each client’s solution delivery.”

Nancy holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern and a Bachelor’s in Business Administration from the University of Notre Dame.

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