Product Development: Are You Ready to Innovate?
Emerging Class of Products
Life insurers are introducing a new class of composite products that package long-term care with traditional insurance. Emerging annuity plans allow accumulation and withdrawal to occur simultaneously.
What can innovation do for a carrier? In a mature market, efficient insurers can target segments of the market, leaving the remainder for other carriers. With more targeted prospect profiles, needs analysis and sales calls have a higher yield.
Finely Tuned Processes
Speed to market is imperative but it is no guarantee of success. Getting the wrong products to market more quickly can make matters worse.
Emphasis must be placed on the end-to-end product life cycle. Support for traditional functions such as customer analytics and product performance will in turn create new requirements for supporting technology. The overall process is characterised collaborative knowledge performed by a variety of subject matter experts.
The industry’s emphasis on the policy administration system as the core for product development must change. Most carriers have administration systems developed to enable efficient insurance transaction processing for new and in-force business.
These systems have become the de facto repository for product rules and calculations. Those older systems aren’t going away anytime soon because they support millions of policies. So technology to support product innovation must embrace the existence of a carrier’s existing systems.
We are the industry’s leading provider of life and annuity software. CSC’s Product Accelerator® works independently of and acts as product repository and configuration tool specifically adapted for innovation.It includes a unique combination of capabilities:
Insurance Rule and Calculation Support
Requirements for a calculation and rules are highly specialised in insurance. Externalising these calculations from policy administration systems allows the creation of products at the front of the product life cycle. The process eliminates the need to hand off specifications for coding and the associated delays in review and validation.
The rules and calculation engine includes a design too and an efficient run-time engine. This is easily integrated into the administration, illustration and other systems that rely on those rules.
Repository
The repository puts product definitions and knowledge assets under control at a single point rather than across many systems, file cabinets and desktops.
Product Library
“Empty” configuration tools have limited usefulness. Product Accelerator includes pre-loaded insurance products in the repository, allowing insurers to focus on points of difference.
Life Cycle Support
The configuration tool includes user interfaces for tasks such as actuarial design. In addition tools and methodology for critical path tasks such as regression testing are included freeing the users of the need to know specific programming languages. This resolves many problems arising from business-to-IT handoffs and the inevitable information disconnects.
Don’t Get Left Behind
Life and annuity carriers must focus on the business competency that makes them distinctive. Product Accelerator is one of an emerging class of applications built specifically for product innovation — not just speed to market.
As carriers adopt this new technology and take product innovation to the next level, the era of fast followers could be coming to an end. Don’t get left behind.