For some time, life & annuities carriers have suffered from a multitude of legacy platforms, with each implemented to handle a particular style of product that was either not handled by its predecessor or was added through the acquisition of a set of blocks from another carrier. The resulting stable of platforms has always been expensive to maintain. In recent years, this has been compounded by the increasing importance of digital customer experience and the ability to launch new products quickly.

The pandemic has further emphasized these needs with consumers increasingly moving online, the need for new types of insurance products, and the vast majority of companies increasing their digital transformation emphasis. While most of Infosys McCamish’s current pipeline is driven by mergers & acquisitions and platform rationalization and optimization to modernize legacy environments, they have also onboarded new clients to provide end-to-end services for open blocks, becoming a viable partner for organizations looking to expand their new business pipeline.

Infosys McCamish Focuses on Client Interaction

Indeed, while life companies need to launch new products at speed, insurance product functionality is now increasingly taken as table stakes. Life & annuities producers are now much more focused on client interaction functionality. This includes the omni-channel experience and the ability to deliver a zero-touch digital engagement, incorporating, for example, machine learning to deliver straight-through processing and next-best actions.

In line with these requirements, Infosys McCamish has taken a 3-tiered approach:

• For policy owners & agents: aiming for zero-touch, omnichannel, and responsive design via portals, e-delivery, e-sign, smart video, SMS notify, and chatbots
• For operations: aiming for ‘one & done’ via the use of workflow, dashboards, content management, and document management
• Core administration functionality: aiming for seamless integration via APIs together with an extensive product library.

Infosys McCamish’s preference is to convert policies from client legacy platforms to its own VPAS platform. Its conversion accelerator identifies data cleanliness and produces balance and control reports before moving the policy data to VPAS. Not all data is moved to VPAS, with data beyond the reinstatement period being moved to a separate source data repository. Infosys McCamish will aim to have 13-24 months of re-processable data on its platform, converting all the history as it was processed on the original platform so that in the future, it is possible to view exactly what happened on the prior platform.

VPAS supports a wide range of life & annuity products, including term life, traditional life, universal life, deferred annuities, immediate annuities, and flexible spending accounts, and Infosys McCamish estimates that on mapping a carrier’s current products with the current configurations in VPAS, there is typically around 97% full compatibility. VPAS currently supports ~40m policies across 22 distinct product families.

However, where necessary or where conversion for some policy types is impossible, it can also wrap its customer experience tools around legacy insurance platforms to provide a common and digital customer experience. Infosys McCamish platforms make extensive use of an API library that supports synchronous and asynchronous communication between Infosys McCamish systems and customer systems.

Incorporating “Smart Video” into the Customer Experience

Infosys McCamish has enhanced its customer experience to enable policy/contract owners to go beyond viewing policies online and transact in real-time, further introducing:

• Mobile App and chatbot functionality
• Smart video, which uses APIs to extract data and present it to the customer in video form
• Wearables to support wellness products.

Customers can view their billing and premium information and obtain policy quotes online, with personalized smart video used to enhance the customer experience. They can also initiate policy surrenders online. Depending on carrier policy, surrenders to a certain value are handled automatically, with higher value surrenders being passed to a senior person for verification. Similarly, if a customer is seeking to extend their coverage online, the request is routed by the workflow to an underwriter or senior manager. DocuSign is used to facilitate the use of e-signatures rather than paper documents. All correspondence can be viewed online by customers, with AI-enabled web chat used to support customer queries.

Digital adoption depends on carrier policy and is running at ~25%, with customers being prompted to use digital in all correspondence. Single-touch and no-touch processing account for ~75% of transactions.

Workflow & Dashboards Guiding Agents to Reduce Time to Onboard

Infosys McCamish has integrated BPM and workflow and low-code development to support the back-office and call center service layers to provide operations with inbuilt automation to achieve increased levels of straight-through processing and fewer opportunities for manual errors. It incorporates business rules so that data is only keyed once with, for example, relevant customer updates applied to one policy type being applied across all of their policies.

The VPAS customer service work desk is built on Pega, with the workflow configured for contact center and back-office services and supporting the customer and agent self-service portals.

The agent dashboard is dynamic with the view shown based on the agent role, and the call center dashboard provides drill-downs on service requests by type, SLA performance details such as average handling times, and the full audit trails of each transaction.

The workflow also guides the call center agent through the steps in a transaction, provides scripting, and uses AI to recommend additional actions when communicating with a customer. This improves the quality of each interaction and significantly reduces the time taken to train new agents.

The above is supported by experience enablers underpinned by the data warehouse, which is updated in real-time as changes are made in the policy administration system. The data warehouse is accessed via APIs by Infosys Nia analytics or third-party tools such as PowerBI or Tableau.

Product Configuration Based on Cloning Existing Products

New products are typically created within the product management module by cloning an existing product or template and business rules; for example, customizing to add or remove certain features or coverages, rather than by creating new product features and functionality.

VPAS new business supports digital new business, including E-App and underwriting case management, and integrations with other new business platforms such as iPipeline and FireLight.

Agent Management & Compensation Increasingly Bundled with Product Administration

In addition to the VPAS life and annuity product administration system, Infosys McCamish’s life & annuity platforms also include PMACS, a producer management & compensation system, supporting agent onboarding, licensing, and commission management.

Infosys McCamish is experiencing a greater requirement for end-to-end capability, with PMACS increasingly being bundled with VPAS. The emphasis within PMACS has moved beyond commission management, where the system shows the agent how each commission was calculated, to agent onboarding, licensing, and appointments, allowing agents to view their pipelines and their client policy portfolios.

PMACS has also moved beyond supporting life & annuities and group & critical illness to support property & casualty.

Summary

Infosys McCamish is increasingly looking to assist life & annuities carriers in the adoption of modern digital platforms, and their VPAS ecosystem emphasizes:

• Digitalization, with a high emphasis on separation of systems of engagement from systems of record
• Componentization, to facilitate low impact enhancements and speed to market
• Self-service for both customers and agents, in support of zero-touch processing and multi-channel access
• Integrated BPM and workflow and low-code development in support of the back-office and call center service layers
• Use of CI/CD to identify the impact that changes in one component will have on other software components.

John Willmott and Rachael Stormonth