Metropolitan Life, working with Falcorp, has successfully implemented OIPA – Oracle’s Insurance Policy Administration platform – into its business. This key milestone forms part of an ambitious system transformation programme within Metropolitan aimed at decommissioning the mainframe – possibly one of the most complex, high-risk transformation programmes in the insurance sector. The initiative positions the insurer to innovate faster, operate more efficiently and compete more effectively in a fast-evolving and competitive market like South Africa.
The project spanned three years and involved over 100 people collaborating across multiple regions to incrementally deliver products on the OIPA platform. This was followed by a series of complex data migrations with the objective of establishing a modern, cloud-based, API-rich platform for savings, investment and annuity products. The team re-engineered and implemented critical functions such as funds management, commissions and investment trading – while integrating with several existing Momentum Group platforms to ensure end-to-end success.
Midway through the programme, the regulatory introduction of the Two-Pot retirement system added a new layer of complexity. OIPA’s flexible, rules-driven engine allowed rapid adaptation to support the new regulatory requirements, ensuring compliance without disrupting ongoing operations. OIPA’s design flexibility, product configurability and integration capabilities were well proven, along with the project team’s ability to pivot and accommodate unplanned change.
Falcorp supported Metropolitan further to build an internal OIPA Support Team, enabling a hybrid delivery model for Metropolitan, which can be scaled up or down at any time to meet varying business demands without carrying large IT overhead costs.
“OIPA helps us move faster – we built seven products in just over two and a half years, and completed two migrations onto OIPA. I believe this platform will significantly help to reduce time to market for new offerings,” says Irwhan Rakiep, Chief Information Officer at Metropolitan Life. “That aligns with our strategy to be more agile and continually improve customer experience. With OIPA and all the APIs now in place, we can easily integrate to new capabilities like modern payment engines, digital sales tools and third-party systems to help drive innovation.”
Not only did the migration proceed with minimal impact to clients or sales teams, it also delivered on key reforms and enabled the launch of a range of localised investment and savings offerings. These include a Tax-Free Savings Plan, Endowment Savings Plan, Retirement Annuity Preservation Fund, Guaranteed and Living Annuities, Term Certain Annuity, Life Cover and a Smoothed Bonus Investment Fund.
Falcorp and Metropolitan Life attribute the successful execution of the project to maintaining commitment, resilience and the continual fostering of the shared vision over the three-year period.
Falcorp Director Garth Hendrickse notes: “Core policy administration transformation projects are the toughest of projects; they are notoriously complex, high risk and a historically low likelihood of success, but they must happen for insurance businesses to modernise, digitise and reduce cost. It’s a brave CIO who takes on one of these projects in their careers. They have to keep their teams motivated for years and keep the business and executive leadership committed to the project throughout. Metropolitan Life’s CIO not only managed to pull this off, but his foresight in architecting the channel systems in place using modern design patterns, supported by OIPA’s integration flexibility, allowed us to replace the legacy systems, leaving these systems operational, in place and Metropolitan’s investment in them unaffected.”
Rakiep says: “A key concern with projects like these is negatively impacting the promises you have made to clients, or mistakes with serious financial implications. It gives you sleepless nights. Our clients trust us to pay them their retirement income every month and are dependent on that income. There is no room for error – they have debit orders coming off and bills to pay. We also had to keep over 2 000 sales advisors productive every day, with no interruption to collections, claims and other services our clients depend on. One mistake at scale could cost millions.
“There were many challenges, of course – the unavoidable scope changes, competing priorities and stakeholder management, all while doing our day jobs. We got through it because of the commitment and resilience from everyone involved, combined with the Falcorp team’s deep insurance domain knowledge and extensive OIPA technical know-how, enabling us to ideate and navigate challenges quickly.”
He adds: “Insurance is a tricky domain, and all the teams involved have to understand the industry and the deep complexity involved in our systems. The Falcorp team members were exceptionally competent and knowledgeable, and – very importantly – they never ignored my concerns, I always felt heard and could engage freely. They were deeply involved, fully integrated with my teams and responsive at every stage. I never felt the engagement was outsourced – we felt like one team.
"OIPA gave us a foundation we can continue to build on – we’re modern, API-enabled and ready to innovate further.”
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