USBA Replaces Life Insurance System, Launches New Products with CSC’s Software
Client: Uniformed Services Benefit Association
Challenge: Replace USBA’s aging legacy system and shorten time to market for new products
Solution: CSC Convenience system for specialty insurance products
Results: Shortened the time to launch new life insurance products from six months to a few weeks
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The Uniformed Services Benefit Association (USBA) was at a crossroads. With the U.S. government expanding its subsidized group life coverage to active military personnel, USBA wanted to introduce new term life products that would appeal to service members leaving active duty. However, USBA’s aging legacy insurance processing system, which was running on a leased mainframe, hampered the group’s ability to introduce new products.
CSC-Hosted Software
USBA talked to CSC, which proposed hosting the new policy administration system at a CSC data center, giving USBA employees Web-based access to CSC’s Convenience software and allowing the organization to offload the ongoing maintenance of the system to CSC. USBA liked the open structure of the system and flexibility, and the pricing was a big advantage.
Rapid Product Launches
Over the next year, CSC converted USBA’s products to CSC’s system. USBA offers a variety of affordable term and whole life products with single, joint and family coverages that are ideal for highly mobile members of the service, many of whom are starting families. USBA’s Generation 3 plan, for example, blends whole life, decreasing term, and paid-up additional insurance with level coverage and premiums designed to remain level.
With the new system in place, USBA launched a children’s whole life policy, First Steps, and introduced a new 10-year level-term product under a streamlined development cycle.
“Previously, it would take about six months or longer to get the system configured to support getting new products to market,” said Vernon Branson, vice president, Information Systems. “Now our Information Systems department can do almost everything in a week, and even with some programming requirements it would only take a month.”
Improved Capabilities
To provide USBA employees with easy-to-access information, CSC worked with the organization to create an interface that consolidates key client and policy information on a single user-friendly screen.
“It gives our staff access to the basic information they need without having to search through several screens,” said Connie Markovich, USBA’s senior vice president of Administration and Member Services. “Rolling that out made a world of difference in being able to look up information and respond to questions.”
The new system’s reporting capabilities have simplified the process of providing information to management, as well as outside auditors. “We’ve created 400-plus reports over the past three years,” Branson said. “It’s so much easier to query data.”