Turning Your Policy Admin System Into a Competitive Weapon

Revolutionary Product Introduction Software Changes Competitive Landscape

In the continuing race for product supremacy, most life and annuity providers have reached a plateau when it comes to speed to market. They've fine-tuned the handoffs between business units and IT departments, but many are still working with outdated technology environments - supporting a host of policy administration, new business and call center applications. Insurers spend millions of dollars every year on systems, but a change as simple as a new product attribute still takes weeks to complete.

CSC is changing the competitive landscape with the recent announcement of software that revolutionizes the product introduction process.

"We've made amazing progress with technology," says Michael Risley, president of CSC's Life and Annuity Division. "Business users can now perform tasks that used to require the skills of programmers. This revolutionary approach eliminates the silos many companies face in managing calculations, rules, tables and specifications across their organizations."

Introducing Product Accelerator

CSC is introducing the flagship in its popular Accelerator suite of software. Product AcceleratorTM is an easy-to-use product introduction tool that puts business users in control and reduces reliance on IT departments. Non-technical business users across multiple departments can configure both calculations and product definitions with a graphical, drag-and-drop tool that's preloaded with the industry's most comprehensive product content.

In developing the requirements for Product Accelerator, CSC leveraged 30 years of experience in product definition, business logic, calculations and validation rules. Designed to give product owners control of more than 70 percent of the configurability of the product, it lets users access preloaded templates for the industry's most popular product types.

Product Accelerator will help carriers shorten development cycles from months to days, allow them to create a wider range of product features and address product changes resulting from changes in CSO mortality tables.

Product Accelerator will allow insurers to turn even older, legacy policy administration systems into competitive weapons. CSC's development of this software was in response to demands from leading life, and annuity providers throughout the U.S. for a way to address speed-to-market obstacles without completely replacing their systems - or adding on yet another admin system.

Supporting 75 Million Policies and Annuities

CSC's policy administration software supports more than 75 million policies and annuity contracts with CSC's VANTAGE-ONE and CyberLife systems in use at 80 of the top 100 life and annuity providers. Product Accelerator will give those companies a logical development path for their existing processing environments by allowing product definitions to be reused in other enterprise insurance applications.

It incorporates ACORD standards providing industry-standard interfaces for an organization's entire back-end needs. Its service-oriented architecture complies with CSC e4SM, a proven integration framework that enables, extends and evolves the enterprise.

"Product Accelerator can revolutionize a carrier's competitive strategies," Risley says. "It can be implemented quickly to meet immediate speed-to-market needs and simplify the process for both product owners and IT staff. Many people at insurance companies have been waiting a long time for something like this to come along."

For more information, visit www.csc.com/productaccelerator, call 800.345.7672 or send an e-mail to [email protected].