Case Studies
Case Study: Liverpool Victoria - Lowering Maintenance Costs of Closed Books
Liverpool Victoria is the UK's largest Friendly Society, providing a wide range of products and services in Life Assurance, Pensions, General Insurance and Banking. It manages funds of approximately £6.5 billion for its 2 million customers, and consistently tops performance tables for with-profits life and pension policies.
The Challenge
Liverpool Victoria wanted to significantly reduce the operational cost base for administering their life and pensions Closed Books. Their existing systems were expensive to maintain, induced operation inefficiencies and were unable to support their desired levels of customer service.
External pressures - the volatility in investment markets, eroding margins, and further regulatory uncertainty - all added urgency to Liverpool Victoria's need to implement a cost-effective solution.
The key objectives of the Sapiens project were to build a complete replacement for their outdated policy administration systems and to migrate the data for 3.5 million policies onto it. The new system would become Liverpool Victoria's single strategic platform for all their existing Closed Books, and also enable them to easily integrate further books of business that they expected to acquire in the future.
The Solution
The Sapiens solution involved the development of a life and pensions administration application to replace Liverpool Victoria's existing hybrid of ICL and PC-based systems, plus the migration of all existing data from an ICL to an IBM mainframe (Liverpool Victoria's preferred strategic platform).
The system was built using Sapiens eMerge technologies and RAD methodologies. It is fully integrated with Liverpool Victoria's other essential systems, allowing existing IT investments to continue to be utilised. It also has a browser-based user interface, allowing versions of the application to be automatically rolled-out, reducing ongoing PC support costs.
During the entire project, Sapiens consultants worked hand-in-hand with Liverpool Victoria's business management to review existing administrative practices and re-define business processes in order to take full advantage of the new web-enabled environment.
An underlying requirement of the Sapiens Closed Books Solution was that it should facilitate future transition to Euro. Sapiens' considerable experience in the field of Euro Impact Analysis and Euro Migration was applied in the design and development of the application.
The entire project was completed within the targeted timescale of only twenty-four months, and also to budget. This speed of delivery, from initial requirements gathering, through design and development, to final delivery into production, was an outstanding feat.
The Result
Implementation of this solution has significantly reduced the cost of administration of these 3.5 million policies, and has also enabled Liverpool Victoria to streamline its business processes. The new solution offers one-stop process execution, reduced training needs and costs, greater transactional throughput, better management information, improved reliability and improved financial control.
"With the new system from Sapiens, we have achieved a very significant immediate reduction in our IT costs",.. "Also, using their extensive Life and Pensions operational experience, Sapiens was able to review our administrative practices and build a far greater degree of process automation into the new system, which now enables us to provide a much improved customer service."
Michael Allen
Business Project Sponsor