American National Simplifies Product Introduction with CSC’S Real-Time Software

Client: American National Insurance Company

Challenge: Replace five aging policy administration systems and improve the product introduction process

Solution: CSC’s CyberLife Enterprise Administration Software integrated with Visual Product Modeling System (VP/MS)

Results: Consolidated five core systems into CyberLife, allowing business users to configure the system as needed, and improved support for product development, illustrations and automated underwriting

Learn more about CyberLife and VP/MS or contact us.

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Once known as a home service company, American National has transitioned into a mid-sized multi-line carrier with an ever-growing, complex line of life and annuity products, including a range of variable and indexed products. Over the years, American National has acquired a number of carriers, most of which were folded into the corporation through conversions of closed blocks. As the company evolved, developing innovative products while adhering to regulations and keeping costs down became increasingly important.

To respond to competitive challenges, American National needed to overcome some fundamental limitations of its core policy administration systems. Over the years, the company had accumulated five admin systems, most of which were more than 30 years old and still using Assembler code. These systems required lengthy batch cycles every night, and the process of creating specifications and coding new products was time-consuming and prone to mistakes.

Life Insurer Consolidates Systems to Support Acquisitions and Growth

American National evaluated options for consolidating its systems or creating a front-end wrapper that would allow users to access multiple systems through a common user interface. The company decided the best approach was consolidation, It evaluated several products on the market, including CyberLife, CSC’s Web-enabled software that supports the full enterprise including new business, product definition, underwriting, administration, billing and collection and claims. Ultimately, the company chose to consolidate its life and annuity systems and more than 3 million policies onto CyberLife.

“CSC provides rich product support and a well-respected staff,” said Meredith Mitchell, vice president, Application Development & Support at American National. “CSC’s industrial-strength systems support some of the nation’s largest carriers. We trusted that we were moving into a long-term relationship with a stable vendor that knows the industry.”

Integrating Illustration and New Business

Rather than undertake a laborious file-to-file conversion, the company opted to convert by bringing transactions into CyberLife. Data was taken from the old system and submitted as online transactions to CyberLife so that the system treated them as new business, thus enabling CyberLife to build its own policy master record. By automating this task, Mitchell explained, the resulting policies were more robust and less prone to error. One of the key benefits of using CyberLife was its integration with CSC’s Visual Product Modeling System (VP/MS), a platform-independent rules and calculations tool. The first U.S. insurer to license VP/MS, American National uses it for a variety of tasks from supporting its homegrown illustration system to product development.

“Developing and maintaining homegrown illustrations systems is much easier and faster than it once was,” Mitchell said. “The programming staff can put all the calculations in VP/MS and then build the screens and the shell of the model. We developed our illustration systems much more quickly as a result of VP/MS.” As part of its overall modernization program, American National also implemented CSC’s nbAccelerator as its core life underwriting system, including requirements management, underwriting management and workflow and productivity reporting.” We have several homegrown application entry systems that feed nbAccelerator, and we let CyberLife New Business handle all of the policy issues,” Mitchell explained.

Accelerating Product Introduction

Consolidating on CyberLife has generated significant benefits to American National. The old systems were mostly batch-oriented, so shifting to a real-time system has made a major difference in the efficiency of transaction processing. “With CyberLife, we’re able to process 3 million policies reliably every night and have the online system back up the next morning,” Mitchell said. “It used to be a real challenge to do that with five different systems.”

Most importantly, American National’s product introduction timeframe has greatly improved. By integrating VP/MS with CyberLife, American National has been able to reduce the testing and verification effort required for new products, as well as to boost the product knowledge base in the IT organization. CSC’s nbAccelerator software is part of an automated workflow, which reduces handoffs, automates tasks and generally increases the productivity of the administrative operations. The company’s legacy automated underwriting system had become increasingly difficult to maintain, especially across multiple companies and systems. By integrating nbAccelerator with CyberLife, American National was able to eliminate its own complex interfaces and process business for multiple companies with a single system.

“Today, our IT staff is more of an enabler of business, and we focus most of our time on customer-facing systems,” Mitchell said. “Almost everything in CyberLife is completely configurable by the business users. That means our business units are much more self sufficient, and we’ve really taken IT out of the critical path."