Systems: Policy Administration

Depending on the audience (certainly within Operations and IT), the Policy Administration is often seen as the core of the business. And there is no denying that it will normally be the focus of all post-sale activity for a customer/policy.

Key Functions
The Policy Admin system focuses on managing a policy throughout the usual lifecycle. Traditionally the emphasis is on handling the policy rather than the customer. Only some of the more recent systems available in the market are truly customer-centric in their behaviours. Key modules will usually include:

• New Business capture, underwriting, and policy issuance
• Premium collection, including suspense account management
• Lapse processing (managing non-payment of premiums)
• Policy Servicing (endorsements)
• Maturity handling (incl expiry for risk products)
  
• Loans
• Claims (sometimes handled in separate systems)
• Annuity Payments (sometimes handled in separate systems)
  

Position in Systems Architecture
Organisations tend to take one of two approaches. They either stick religiously to a single Policy Administration system, forcing all products onto the same system, or they allow systems to proliferate to the point where many systems contain a single product.

This second approach tends to give rise to complex architectures that involve operational data stores and "single customer view" components. These can often be an effort to patch over inadequacies in the admin systems in terms of functionality, technical architecture, and scalability issues. Vendor capacity for development can also be a key driver.

Variations
Policy Admin systems will sometimes be separated based on the Group or Individual product sets. Group policies require different handling (in many ways simpler) in both policy servicing and premium collection/management.

Further, a breakdown of product sets into (a) Risk/Traditional, (b) Unitised, and (c) Annuities will also drive separation of policies across multiple Policy Admin systems.

Vendors
In Asia, examples include:

• Life/Asia (CSC's Life/400 product, customised to fit Asian needs)
• Talisman (Bravura Solutions)
• Ingenium (originally SolCorp, purchased by EDS, now part of HP)
• eBao (eBaoTech in Shanghai)
• FirstLife (First Apex)
  
• InsuranceFaces (Target Harlosh)
• Accenture is pushing ALIP (from US) in Asia but at the time of writing was unable to demonstrate a localised version of the system for any Asian country.
• Oracle has purchased AdminServer in the US with the intention of selling in Asia. This is a new area for Oracle, and at the time of writing there is no localised version.
  

In UK:

• Talisman (Bravura Solutions)
• Elixir (Mastek)
• ALIS (FIServe)
• Lamda (was Marlborough Stirling, acquired by Vertex in 2005)
  

Many companies use whatever the parent company provides or insists on, which is often a mainframe architecture (or similar) that originated in UK or USA.