Pretoria, 22 May 2014
Following its acquisition of the Resolution Life insurance licence, the Ignition Group has launched the Viva Life suite of products and gone live with Exergy, the insurance administration software platform of SilverBridge, who is a provider of software solutions to the financial services industry.
Connect, the SilverBridge Group's implementation and support division, commenced discussions with Ignition last year to assist with the diversification into the provision of insurance products.
"Ignition will initially sell products such as funeral policies through its call centres which target the low premium income end of the market under the Viva Life brand. The complex life products historically sold by Resolution will however also be migrated to the Exergy platform as part of the second phase of the project," says Lee Kuyper, CEO of Connect.
The ability to deploy Exergy2Go, the pre-configured version of Exergy, quickly was a key differentiator in terms of meeting Ignition's requirement for being up and running and in a position to go to market in a short space of time. The solution is designed to be installed almost immediately, become operational in a short space of time and then to be modified to meet specific customer requirements.
"We identified SilverBridge as a system provider that would assist us in taking our range of products to the market quickly. It also provided us with a flexible platform to develop and enhance our product range to suit relevant opportunities in the market," says Greg Ross, MD of Viva Life.
The initial products launched into a production environment during the first phase, were implemented by Connect within less than three months. This was enabled through the use of the pre-configured products and processes within Exergy2Go as the base for building out the solution to meet the further custom requirements.
"The implementation was a collaborative approach between our developers and theirs which resulted in an environment where Viva Life could launch the business and products to the market in a short space of time," says Ross.
Included in the first phase of the implementation was tight integration into the Ignition call centre for new business processing, integration into a SMS gateway for correspondence to clients, as well as integration into the client's financial management system. The Connect team also provided training on the new platform to various areas of the business.
"Go-live timelines were tight but we jointly had strong teams that were committed to ensuring the roll out went smoothly. The client has been very happy with the speed at which we were able to provide them with a solution. In the end what we achieved together was, I believe, something quite unique in terms of the amount of time taken to get from the start of the project through to go-live and launch of the first Viva Life products," says Kuyper.
Ross echoes the sentiment.
"There are always teething issues associated with implementations such as this but everything worked as expected. This is evidenced by the fact that we have launched six insurance products since the company was established in November last year," he says.
"Exergy2Go affords Ignition the ability to expand into its life insurance product offerings in addition to other new types of innovative short-term products. We are excited about the opportunities that working together will afford," concludes Kuyper.
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