PAS Options Plentiful for Life, Health and Annuity Insurers

During the past couple of years, policy administration system vendors have made advances, adding Web-based portal interfaces and improving system administration capabilities, according to new report.

Insurance Networking News, November 18, 2011

Carrie Burns

Surveys and studies show that insurers are actively implementing new policy administration systems. In September, Celent released its “Policy Administration System Vendors, North American Commercial P/C Insurance 2011” report. And this month, the analyst and consulting firm released a similar report for the life, health and annuities industry.

The firm says that despite the continued economic turmoil, there is still a strong interest in renewing and/or replacing policy administration systems (PAS), and these initiatives are necessary to help the industry address growth, service and distribution imperatives.

In its report—“North American Policy Administration Systems 2011: Life, Annuities, and Health ABCD Vendor View”—the firm profiles 18 systems in use among that market and says that since its first report in 2005, activity level has remained active among both insurers and PAS vendors. In the two years from January 2009 to June 2011, more than 40 insurers licensed a new PAS. Since then, several of the profiled vendors have made important advances in usability and personalization, adding Web-based portals interfaces that benefits customer service representatives, underwriters and field users, according to the report. "Clients who have implemented Policy Administration Systems in the last three years report greater satisfaction with system functionality and ease of making changes to their base solution," said Karen Monks, Celent analyst and co-author of the report. "This supports our view that, as vendor systems become more configurable and have more modern user interfaces, clients will recognize both hard and soft benefits from their system modernization."

System administration capabilities for configuring products, rules, workflow, document management and user interfaces have also improved—although, overall, these changes have occurred at more modest pace than improvements for end users, the report states. Additionally, the systems profiled added more lines of business than in the past, particularly group business.

Therefore, insurers have a wide spectrum of systems and vendors to consider when they are looking for a solution to fit their needs. They should begin the process by looking at their own unique mix of lines of business, geography, staff capabilities, business objectives, financial resources and IT group size, Celent says. Some systems bring broad and extensive out-of- the-box functionality that matches an insurer’s lines of business and operating model. Other systems offer powerful configuration tools to build capabilities for both known and future requirements.

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