Accenture Releases ALIP 5.1 with Enhanced Functionalities

By Michael Guta
TMCnet Contributing Writer

The annual Accenture Technology Vision for Insurance report had a grim statistics highlighting the challenges the industry is facing. The research found, 67 percent of insurance customers would consider buying insurance products from other than insurers. Adding insult to injury, 23 percent would consider buying it from online service providers such as Google (News - Alert) and Amazon.

The insurance industry, as well as virtually every other industry, is at an inflection point as digital technology continues to weed out the ones that will move forward and those that will wither and die. While the release of the Accenture Life Insurance & Annuity Platform (ALIP) 5.1 might not solve the industry’s current predicament, it will give insurance companies innovative tools online service providers can’t offer their customers.

Buying the right insurance is as important as buying your first house, vehicle and any other big ticket item. It might even be more important, because it protects those very same assets we consider valuable. As an advanced life insurance and annuity software suite, ALIP is designed to support mission critical products and processes.

With ALIP, carriers can navigate the digital ecosystem and modern technologies with smart video, web recording and replay, mobility, portals and analytics capabilities. Armed with these and other solutions they can respond to the needs of consumers and legislative requirements while ensuring future growth throughout the policy lifecycle. The software is designed to function as individual standalone components or a full end-to-end solution with the flexibility to handle insurers of any size.

The ALIP 5.1 release has updates that will give life and annuity insurance companies solutions for modernizing and transforming their business. The updates are:

Empowering the business user – New features supporting the end-to-end policy issue process – including decision support, requirements management, evaluation results and policy journal – increase self-sufficiency and improve speed and accuracy for new business and underwriting. Modernized payout processing functionality such as liquidity value, commuted value and annuity payment calculations are designed to increase annuity speed to market. Additionally, configuration of common tax calculations, supplemental coverages and mortality changes help streamline product development.

Improving channel management – New agent and commission capabilities have been added that improve overall channel management and meet changing agent demands. Net commissions, commission balance tracking, compensation adjustments and the ability to support multiple instances of a single agent have been incorporated to increase distribution effectiveness.

Extending system flexibility and ease of use – new forms, fields and calculations that enhance customer management, contract management, transaction management and administration capabilities such as billing and correspondence. Additional account views and advanced search functions allow for improved levels of operational efficiencies and minimized customization requirements.

Improving implementation speed and simplification – An expanded set of pre-built interfaces help enable fast and simple implementation. Real-time integration with third party underwriting agencies such as the Medical Information Bureau (MIB), Motor Vehicle Records (MVR) and prescription history vendors, batch interfaces, as well as addition of annuity staging tables and an integration workbench reduce time, cost and risk when moving into production with ALIP.

Expanding performance and ROI – The addition of Sonar, an open source infrastructure tool that automates code quality checking, as well as improvements to data migration tools helps reduce implementation time associated with configuration management. The most recent ALIP performance test showed significant improvements, including page to page performance, page loading, throughput for large nightly batch processes, and nightly transaction processing throughout.

The Accenture (News - Alert) report went on to say, forward-thinking insurers are considering what the next wave of disruption will mean for their businesses. But it warns, those that don’t get out of the starting blocks quickly enough will be outrun by insurers as well as tech companies, automotive manufacturers, and others. In order to avoid this outcome, insurance companies must be early adopters of digital solutions, and the ALIP 5.1 software is not a bad beginning.