Allianz Life Pursues STP

Insurer streamlines new business processing with NaviSys Front Office.

As part of its strategy to support projected sales growth, Minneapolis-based Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America ($13.8 billion in gross earned premium) selected NaviSys' (Edison, N.J.) Front Office to automate new business processing. Using the solution, Allianz Life is seeking to create a single workflow and achieve straight-through processing (STP) for all applications, regardless of product line, distribution channel or location, according to a release.

In late 2005, Allianz Life decided that abandoning manual processing and consolidating the systems that support all of its products would help the carrier improve sales, relates Allianz Life VP John Esch. "Our expectations were that we would have a solution that would be able to handle the multiple products that we sell and that we would be able to incorporate a common process for all the products across the various locations that we operate in," he says.

Allianz Life selected NaviSys Front Office after evaluating offerings from three vendors, which Esch declines to name, in February 2006. A rules-driven platform that supports STP, the solution enables "once and done" data entry for agents and provides workflow and case management, according to the vendor. It also generates illustrations and quotations.

Esch says Allianz Life chose Front Office because the platform-neutral solution was architecturally consistent with the carrier's needs and could be configured easily. Implementation began this spring and will be completed to support Allianz Life's new fixed annuity business by the fourth quarter of 2006, Esch notes.

According to Esch, by streamlining new-business processing, Allianz hopes to improve capacity and customer service. "We need to keep an eye on maintaining exceptional customer service," he says. "This is a transformational effort and will allow us to increase our capacity and deliver high-quality service across all of our products."

Allianz Life plans to extend the use of NaviSys Front Office to variable annuity products, life insurance products and long-term care insurance products during the first half of 2007. --Maria Woehr