Simplification Drives As-a-Service in Life Insurance

Simplification is at the core of the As-a-Service construct—an operational and technical state for flexibility and scalability that can quickly respond to market movements and business needs. The biggest challenge that insurance carriers face in reaching this state is writing off legacy—seemingly freeing the company from the constraints of legacy technology platforms. This is critical given the lack of integration and agility to keep up with changing product portfolios and regulations (read more about this challenge in our Soundbite, Wanted: Insurance Carriers To Lead The Charge On As-a-Service).

OneShield, a core systems software provider that started in the property and casualty insurance segment is making inroads to now helping life insurance carriers on this journey to As-a-Service, and demonstrates many characteristics of a technology partner willing to invest in simplification. The vendor recently released details of its new engagement with specialty carrier, Advantage Insurance Holdings Ltd., which is leveraging OneShield’s enterprise software to upgrade its core systems for issuing and rating insurance products, particularly its Private Placement Life Insurance (PPLI) portfolio.

Why does this deal matter?

• It embraces the key technology-driven ideals of the As-a-Service Economy: Advantage Insurance will be going from manual, paper-based processes to complete digitization, automating almost 100% of policy document management and enabling faster task and document processing and reporting. OneShield’s cloud-based platform features subscription pricing and a metadata-based architecture. Exploiting this, OneShield is setting up Advantage Insurance to implement an in-house capability for rapid process changes and system configuration, and has set out an upgrade roadmap that won’t disrupt product and business logic configurations—what often takes painstaking efforts to upgrade for existing on-premise solutions. We see this move towards scalable, plug-and-play digital services as part of the market direction for delivering Insurance As-a-Service.
• It demonstrates OneShield’s ability to spin-off industry-relevant platforms across financial services: Last year, OneShield stated its intention to use its application development platform and automation and digitization capabilities to develop standalone, cloud-based As-a-Service solutions for other BFSI segments. Within insurance, personal lines have more mature systems with greater progress on straight through processing, being relatively lower risk and more transactional. Arguably, more complex lines such as commercial and specialty have a bigger need for granular standardization and automation where error-prone, manual interventions are typical across account and policy lifecycles. OneShield honed in on one such specialty segment within variable life, PPLI, where the potential is high. It used its application development platform to configure an end-to-end solution in less than 9 months, and reportedly, “without writing a single line of code,” according to OneShield President and CEO Glenn Anschutz.

A critical element of this move is the forward-thinking partnership role facilitated by the client organization, Advantage Insurance. This deal gives us greater evidence of our assertion—the insurance mid-market will embrace As-a-Service far more willingly and rapidly than larger enterprises. This combination of a need for flexibility to support business growth and buy-in for modern technology constructs such as multi-tenant deployment will see greater interest from and partnerships with mid-market carriers for ambitious software and service providers through 2016.