Capital Alliance Life (CAL), one of South Africa`s leading life insurance companies, has gone live with the new-business component of Caliber, its new Web-enabled multi-company insurance and financial contract management system, developed in conjunction with Global Technology Services. Its aim with Caliber is to become the most cost-effective financial services administrator in the industry, driving all aspects of its business with a single operations engine.
The complete Caliber system will be developed at a cost in excess of R2 million over a 12-month period, breaking new ground in the financial services market by abstracting the business rules into a write-once read-many central repository, or business rules processor. In effect this creates a multi-tier architecture, in terms of which business rules are encapsulated as objects and separated from the business logic, database and presentation layer.
"This approach allows Capital Alliance to deliver new business products faster and at a lower cost, with reduced maintenance and cost of ownership," says Neil Murray, director at Global Technology Services. "It assists the company in capturing knowledge of the business in a central point, and creates a new platform for both new products and CAL`s legacy business."
CAL`s legacy systems were originally developed 16 years ago, for IGI Life, Capital Alliance`s predecessor, to run on Prime minicomputers. They have stood the test of time and have proven to be robust and scalable and today run the CAL systems, on a Sun 4500 server against the Universe database.
During the past four years Capital Alliance has acquired a number of companies, most notably AA Mutual, ACA, Standard General Insurance, and Southern Life`s agency force. Where in 1984 IGI had no more than 20 000 contracts, today Capital Alliance has more than 400 000 individual life contracts under administration. Annual premium receipts in excess of R770 million and assets in excess of R3 billion put it into the nation`s Top 10 of insurers.
"From an IT perspective we have integrated the data of acquired companies into our existing systems as soon as possible, so as to create consistency of processes," says Capital Alliance IT executive Peter Spence.
Capital Alliance`s drive towards new systems began two years ago when it identified a need to change the business to improve processes. The strategy adopted was to change immediately the non-IT processes and implement IT systems using the services of a suitable IT partner. Capital Alliance contracted with Global Technology Services because of its depth of Universe skills and understanding of the Web environment.
Capital Alliance markets some 25 products, with 600 new business rules and 2 000 contract maintenance rules.
"We wanted a system that would store all business rules at a granular level, with English descriptions in a repository, so people`s knowledge did not purely reside in their heads, and in effect to abstract these rules as components common to all processes. This is what we have developed in Caliber," says Spence.
Capital Alliance anticipates a number of benefits from Caliber, Spence reports:
Getting new products to market faster, with a tighter collaboration between actuaries and business analysts. "This approach breaks down the artificial barriers between business and technology, making for more accurate and faster delivery of product," says Spence, "which is an absolute requirement of the business."
Improved client interaction and management of information from its 40-plus branches through integration of its workflow system - also created by Global Technology Services - into Caliber.
Reduction of coding, complexity and easing of the maintenance burden. Because the system is accessed through a Web browser, with content delivered through Dynamic HTML, there is no client-side software to install and maintain.
A simplification of the database structure, with the number of files reduced by some 80%.
Virtual reporting via Web browser, with paper effectively taken out of the loop. This allows all reports to be indexed, searched and downloaded to business intelligence tools for analysis.
Capital Alliance anticipates going live with most of the Caliber system`s functionality by August 2001.
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