Accenture Unveils Enhanced Life Insurance Software Platform
Accenture Life Insurance Platform upgraded to support faster product launches, reduced costs, easier global expansion
SAN DIEGO; May 24, 2011 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has unveiled an enhanced life insurance software platform designed to help life and annuity insurers lower operating costs, focus on profitable growth and strengthen their ability to expand their global footprint.
Among the latest enhancements to the Accenture Life Insurance Platform are: additional advanced administration and processing tools designed to help insurers operate more effectively in an increasingly global marketplace, accelerate product speed to market, improve the experience of software users and reduce implementation costs.
“Policy administration represents a significant opportunity for life and annuity insurers to improve, simultaneously, customer service and operational efficiency,” said Gilles Biscay, global managing director of Accenture Software for insurance. “In this quest for profitable growth, selecting the right software platform is critical, as it can play a pivotal role in enabling insurance companies to launchproducts faster and more frequently, while reducing development costs.”
Enhancements to the Accenture Life Insurance Platform (release 2010.2) focus on five key areas:
Accelerating product speed to market. The upgraded software platform features improved product configuration capabilities that offer support for more than 400 built-in actuarial, mathematical and statistical functions. These functions provide consistency and reusability within the product toolset. They also enable a product designer to create configurable user functions that allowing complex calculations to be implemented without the need for additional programming.
The upgraded software platform also introduces an enhanced product testing workbench and product value debugger that enable configuration and testing within the same product configuration environment. As a result, cases can be quickly entered or imported, transactions can be applied, results can be viewed immediately and products can be adjusted swiftly and easily. The product value debugger allows the product designer to focus closely on a single transaction process, analyze exactly how that process affects data elements associated with the case, move through the transaction process step by step and drill down into complex calculations.
Reducing implementation costs and challenges. The software platform now offers increased configurability of the user experience, allowing insurers to create a more efficient environment that enhances business processes and reduces training requirements. Improvements in product configuration and automated testing capabilities further streamline the introduction of new products, taking the system out of the critical path of new product development and enabling insurers to go to market ahead of the competition. A modern user interface can easily integrate existing legacy platforms, provide a seamless transition during implementation and deliver a cost-effective alternative to conversion along with a consistent look and feel. The result is a more effective organization, a simpler operational environment and lower overall costs.
Addressing the needs of an increasingly global marketplace. Enhancements have been made to introduce a number of business and product configuration features designed to improve the process of localizing the software platform for non-U.S. markets. The upgraded software platform allows users to have access to increased international and multi-country capabilities, including global addresses and financial institutions and support for additional languages. The new release provides a multilingual environment with the ability to change languages in real time.
Improving the user experience. With increased emphasis on configurability, new auto-suggest capabilities and an enhanced ability to quickly search for customers and contracts, the enhanced software platform offers a user experience that is more intuitive and more consistent and provides enhanced usability.
Broadening support for life and annuity products. Another improvement in the Accenture Life Insurance Platform is enhanced support for life insurance products, enabling comprehensive premium calculations, reinstatement definition and management, rate class change and substandard change. Annuity products support has also been improved to include equity index products, fund flexibility and administration processing.
“In the competitive arena of life and annuity insurance, carriers need a strong IT platform that will allow maximum flexibility while limiting operating costs and improving service quality and customer satisfaction,” said Daniele Presutti, managing director of Accenture Life Insurance Services. “Our newly enhanced software platform enables easy integration with limited customization requirements, but can also be used for larger transformation programs, to help life and annuity insurers of all size address the latest challenges in an increasingly complex market.”
Accenture Life Insurance Services, a business service within Accenture’s Financial Services operating group, serves more than 60 life insurance, annuity and pension clients worldwide.
About Accenture Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 215,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US $21.6 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2010. Its home page is www.accenture.com.
Accenture Software combines deep technology acumen with industry knowledge to develop differentiated software products. It offers innovative software-based solutions to enable organizations to meet their business goals and achieve high performance. Its home page is www.accenture.com/software
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