Building Insurance and Annuity Products in Half the Time

CSC takes the guesswork out of developing new products with its Product Accelerator.

BEST’S REVIEW: Can you give us a quick overview of what Product Accelerator does?

KLAUSER: Product Accelerator is really the first technology of its kind to act as a facility to build insurance and annuity products. CSC has studied the product introduction process and by all accounts insurance companies would agree that the time to get insurance products to market is much slower than they can tolerate. We took an anatomical look at the chokepoints in the product introduction process and we’ve responded with an automation capability that allows companies to introduce new products in a utility that will streamline the product introduction process. We believe Product Accelerator will be recognized as “the” office automation tool for product definitions. Product Accelerator is focused on standardization of product definitions across an enterprise. It will substantially reduce the friction of understanding how to build insurance products and what kinds of products already exist. Group collaboration is enabled through the product depository in Product Accelerator.

BR: And who is the target audience for Product Accelerator?

KLAUSER: Anybody affiliated with the manufacturing process is going to benefit from the use of Product Accelerator. That would include the business community, IT professionals, the actuarial groups and the product designers. In most organizations that are large in size, these competencies could be siloed in four different organizations. A technology that allows that organization to bring the product introduction process together into one collaborative environment will benefit all of those parties and reduce the amount of translation and definition that occurs between one group and the next group.

BR: Does a product like this affect a company’s speed to market?

KLAUSER: Yes, that is the whole vision of Product Accelerator. Product Accelerator embodies the full life cycle of product development. We’re trying to take out the waste and actual cost involved in product development. So by doing that, we’re improving time-to-market benefits. Those can be harder to quantify from company to company. But it’s safe to say that we expect to take out anywhere from 30% to as much as 80% of the product introduction process.

BR: Where would something like this fit in with insurers’ concerns over remaining compliant?

KLAUSER: Maintaining an inventory of product definitions provides a better understanding of the company’s capabilities. It’s quite often where we will engage a company that really doesn’t understand the full capability inside of their system. As a result, any sort of compliance checking or getting a better understanding of the execution requires IT to go in and provide surgery to actually get the information out of the system. Many times these folks are not well versed in insurance. Add to that the fact that a lot of companies have offshored much of their IT development, the breakdown in understanding what those systems do is getting greater and greater. Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30