Synopsis
When accelerating growth is a mandate, complexity is not an option. That’s why a leading Australian insurer partnered with Coforge—to simplify their systems by consolidating disparate applications from multiple acquisitions into a single global platform. The resulting operational transformation has delivered more value to the client—helping them work simpler, understand customers better, and respond to changing needs faster.
About the Client
One of Australia’s largest insurance companies, the client offers solutions in life risk insurance, wealth management, financial planning, and trustee services. They also manage investments for individuals, superannuation funds, and institutional investors.
Business Challenge
As a part of an aggressive growth strategy, the client acquired several insurance companies, resulting in an IT landscape with disparate applications from various acquisitions. These applications were impeding seamless policy servicing and new business. The way forward was to consolidate the applications into a single target platform without degrading service delivery to insurance advisors and customers.
Our Solution
We recognized that an application consolidation and rationalization exercise of this scale would need to address two concerns. One, be mindful that standardization does not impact unique requirements of a vast product portfolio. Two, the ever-changing regulatory environment in insurance requires flexible system architecture. To address these concerns, we interacted with business users of the acquired companies and ensured that their individual product-specific needs were not lost in the consolidation process. We then conducted a detailed technical analysis of all the existing systems to devise an architecture that was highly scalable to adapt to the future needs while being easy to maintain.
This was followed by a migration of multiple applications at each individual location to the new platform. The migration was a massive effort with multiple threads being managed simultaneously. Even as the new system was rolled out to all the locations, the older applications were supported for critical processes and phased out gradually. Add to this, the diversity of the applications consolidated, including risk portfolio, endowment, traditional life, interest bearing, unit linked and superannuation, which makes the new platform a mission-critical system that serves the client’s operations across the globe.
Delivering More Value
The implementation of the new platform has improved productivity and increased business agility for the client’s varied businesses. Some of the key benefits include:
More Savings: Consolidation reduced the overall cost of application maintenance and support. More Revenue: Aligning the applications with the needs of the business led to an increase in revenue. More Simplicity: The platform enabled ease of unit price entry and sending unit movement reports to asset management teams. More Delight: Consolidation eases customer service operations and enables business teams to respond to customer needs faster. More Insight: We enabled the creation of analytical reports in the platform, which helps senior management make strategic decisions.
