Aviva Life Insurance Rapidly Launches Innovative Products, Supports Core Systems with CSC’s Outsourcing Services

Aviva Life, the U.S. subsidiary of the world’s sixth-largest insurance group, saw demand growing for indexed annuities and wanted to rapidly introduce a new product to serve that market. Launched in May 2005, the Aviva Progressive Index Annuity was the company’s first indexed annuity and most successful product launch in the history of its agency sales channel, generating $60 million in sales in the first six months.

“It was a challenging task to make the timeline and target due date that was asked of us from an IT development perspective,” said Kathy Veracka, assistant vice president of IT Enterprise Systems for Aviva. “CSC put together a subsidiary team that focused solely on this new product and then later converged with the entire ITO team to finalize the implementation. It worked out very well.”

Building on a 15-Year Relationship

CSC provides product development and applications management support for Aviva’s core administration systems, VANTAGE-ONE and LIFE/70. CSC’s VANTAGE-ONE is the industry’s leading system for processing annuities, used by 15 of the top 20 U.S. life insurers.

“Our 2005 sales goals were very much tied to the Progressive Index Annuity and another annuity product we launched for our financial institution distribution channel called Saver’s Reward,” Veracka said. “Between those two product launches, CSC’s team was instrumental in helping Aviva achieve important sales goals for 2005.”

In addition to CSC’s support, the product launches required coordination between Aviva’s internal IT staff, legal and actuarial teams, business analysts and independent agents. “Over the past few years, we have really worked on creating a template process for new product development, which has enabled us to get them out quickly without hitting any major roadblocks,” Veracka said. “We work closely with CSC’s team to make sure their design and technical analysis is modular and reusable.”

‘Good Mix of Onshore and Offshore Resources’

CSC’s support for Aviva has evolved over more than 15 years to meet the company’s changing business needs. CSC provided full business process outsourcing services from 1990 to 2001. After Aviva licensed CSC’s systems in house, CSC continued to serve as an important component of Aviva’s development team. When Aviva renewed its contract with CSC in late 2005, CSC’s support team was roughly split between CSC’s operations in the U.S. and Noida, India.

By outsourcing the day-to-day maintenance and some development activities to India, Aviva benefits from offshore employees trained on CSC’s life insurance systems and supervised by a team of senior-level programmers for nearly 70 percent off the hourly rate of their U.S.-based counterparts.

“The offshore component is important to us and it makes the total dollar solution more palatable,” Veracka said. “I think we have a good mix of onshore and offshore resources at nearly a 50-50 mix. The team in the U.S. focuses on design and analysis, which is the most important part of the development lifecycle. They transfer the requirements to the offshore team which rapidly develops the code, executes the unit testing, provides their results for review before delivering it to the system, where we provide the final quality assurance testing here at Aviva.”

Introduction of New Systems

In addition to applications management services, CSC helps integrate and troubleshoot feeds between CSC’s administration systems and various downstream systems for accounting, billing, actuarial evaluation, administrative reporting and Aviva’s Web site for agent use only.

The company has also licensed a variety of software products through CSC. DST’s Automated Work Distributor – the same work management system used by CSC’s BPO operations – helps streamline the company’s back-office processes; JETS, an automated data trader; and PATRIOT Protector, a CSC-hosted service that helps financial services firms meet OFAC anti-terrorism and money laundering requirements.

“I don’t believe other companies have the same experience level to support a large volume of clients and meet all of their needs,” she said. “CSC continually works with us to develop ideas on how best to improve the way we implement changes into the system. They’re dedicated to collaborating with us in making processes and procedures more efficient and more effective.”

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