Major insurer grows 90 percent annually with IBM Industry Frameworks solutions

In the business world, becoming a market leader doesn’t happen overnight. But rules are meant to be broken. Founded in the Internet age, a young company is now poised to take the leadership position within its fast-growing regional insurance market. Today, the company ranks among the top 10 life insurance companies in its home country.

Managing to offer quality service to more than 18 million policy holders while continuing to grow its business at up to 90 percent each year creates its own set of challenges.

Leveraging the IBM Insurance Industry Framework approach that provided a platform based on the IBM capabilities to address specific business issues, this company implemented several key solutions from IBM over time with increase sophistication and reuse throughout its growth and progress.

Initially, the insurer enabled its phenomenal growth rate through implementation of a set of robust Internet capabilities. Through the capabilities of the IBM WebSphere Portal—an IBM Insurance Industry Framework solution—the insurance company extended its reach into desired market segments within in its region. This eCommerce initiative was a resounding success in fueling the growth for the company.

To keep pace with growth, the IT department was focused on designing and delivering information and business capabilities to its new offices. To do this, however, the company needed powerful data integration capabilities and Online Transactional Processing applications. Turning to IBM DB2® family of products and IBM Informix® Dynamic Server, The insurer Life was well equipped to access the information it needed to design the new applications it needed to sustain growth—and satisfied the information needs of its business teams.

As the company continued to grow, the insurer realized it could provide more services for its customers if its various information systems could talk to each other. By deploying IBM InfoSphere Federation Server, the company could now view its database solutions as a single resource, giving the insurer access to timely information that greatly improved its strategic business decisions.

Intelligence fuels growth

Not content to rest on its laurels, the insurance leader continued to look for ways to improve its business. This time, the company focused on a way to use its collected data to help its 320,000 insurance agents improve their sales strategies.

In order to provide agents with better sales tools and information, the insurer needed to get a complete and in-depth understanding of its customers. The company turned to other IBM Insurance Industry Framework solutions.

Including elements of IBM hardware and software portfolios, these framework solutions are packaged to enhance insurance industry processes such as claims management, policy administration, underwriting, new business processing, and self-service inquiry and payment through better customer information and greater visibility of the customers.

The insurer saw the solution as a logical next step, allowing the company to take advantage of its existing capabilities along with new packaged software and customized capabilities from the IBM Insurance Industry Framework approach.

Smarter selling

That solution set included deploying IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management Server to bring its fragmented information together and allow employees to get a consolidated look at customer data. By allowing the organization to see a customer's complete relationship with the company, the insurer can ultimately deliver better service, improved customer satisfaction and better sales.

With IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management Server, the company could provide its agents with a 360-degree view of its customers in order to cross-sell and up-sell them. Now the insurer can tailor services specifically to customers’ pension, health, travel and life insurance needs.

Optimizing workflow

Even though its sales are growing by up to 90 percent each year, the insurer’s staffing levels are not necessarily growing to match. How does a business sustain sales growth while keeping employee headcount relatively static? Innovations made possible by IBM FileNet Content Manager are part of the reason.

By creating an indexed, searchable repository for all of the insurer’s various file types and offering workflow and process automation capabilities to drive efficiencies for all content related tasks, FileNet Content Manager is helping agents find what they need faster and ultimately be more productive.

Mind over marketing

The biggest benefit of the IBM Insurance Industry Frameworks solutions may be the insurer’s new ability to further enhance its business capabilities with a common platform—now established through the previous initiatives. To maintain its competitive differentiator, the insurer can continue to understand its customers and design products to meet their needs, leveraging the existing installation of software while easily integrating new software and capabilities. An example of this is the insurer’s website, which offers industry-leading services in its regional insurance market.

For more information

Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit us at:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/industry/insurance/

ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/federation-server

ibm.com/software/data/informix/ids

ibm.com/software/data/db2

ibm.com/systems/p

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