New Software Moves Insurers Beyond Speed to Market
Speed to market is an imperative for life and annuity companies, but so is the ability to tailor products to specific market segments.
The inability to accomplish these two tasks efficiently leaves most insurers with no choice but to follow the innovators without truly differentiating their products in the market.
It’s time for a new class of product configuration software that can support both rapid development and product innovation.
“Product configurators and development tools should contain product development, testing and management functionality, as well as support technology standards for your line of business,” according to a Gartner Inc. report by Kimberly Harris-Ferrante entitled Hype Cycle for Life Insurance, 2007, published 20 June 2007. “Companies should also understand the additional components needed to support product life cycle management, including integration with marketing applications, customer segmentation tools and product profitability analytics."
Shorten Time to Market While Designing Innovative Products
CSC has developed a tool for life and annuity companies that can shorten the product introduction process from weeks or months, to a matter of days.
CSC’s Product Accelerator® works as both a product repository and configuration
tool designed for innovation and fast introduction. It gives the product owner control of over 70 percent of product configurability, reducing IT reliance, streamlining the introduction process and making it easy to tailor products for particular market segments.
Product Accelerator supports key business strategies by allowing insurers to:
Externalise rules and calculations. Externalising rules and calculations from admin systems helps simplify the product introduction process and reduce the total cost of IT ownership. Product Accelerator includes a drag-and-drop design tool and a highly efficient run-time engine that can be easily integrated with administration, illustration and other systems that rely on those rules. Testing cycle times are shortened by 30 percent or more, and IT departments work with a single, low maintenance enterprise tool with industry-standard definitions and interfaces.
Centralise critical data. Product Accelerator centralises all critical data — documentation, rules, calculations, test beds and specifications — in one single, secure repository with versioning and tracking capability. Rates, rules, calculations and plans are stored as interchangeable components for reuse by all stakeholders, including business, IT, actuarial and marketing personnel.
Leverage knowledge and product content. Product Accelerator includes a product library that is pre-loaded with the industry’s most comprehensive life and annuity product content. This allows insurers to focus on points of difference rather than spending time defining numerous product attributes. Through improved modeling, marketing professionals can gain greater competitive insight and deliver products that are in demand.
Support the entire life cycle. Product Accelerator provides a common work environment with built-in support for collaborative design, regression testing and publishing. It removes the need to know specific programming languages and helps eliminate problems arising from business-to-IT handoffs. Integrated security and version control ensure alterations to product data are secured and changes tracked.
Product Accelerator is the first of an emerging class of applications built specifically for product innovation — not just speed to market. With this type of new technology, carriers can easily take product innovation to the next level and leave the fast followers behind.