Replacing the Digital Heart

Samantha Chow owns the life, annuity and health markets at EIS Group, making sure the R&D, sales and marketing teams understand how the company’s technology supports those industries. She brings more than 20 years in life and annuities. She spent several years at Aflac, several at New York Life Direct heading research and strategy, and five years as an analyst at Aite Group covering insurtech, policy administration, underwriting, claims, distribution, data analytics, AI and RPA, before joining EIS about ten months before this recording.

About Samantha Chow

Samantha Chow is the Life, Annuity and Health Markets Lead at EIS Group, which makes EIS Suite, an end-to-end policy administration platform for the insurance industry.

The January Announcement

In January, EIS went live with and announced its life and annuity extension of EIS Suite. The platform had started in P&C, then moved into group benefits a few years earlier, where it saw a huge gap in the market’s ability to digitize enrollment, onboarding and management of group benefits. Samantha, an analyst at the time, was struck by the technology, which is part of why she joined: she thought it was what life and annuity carriers needed.

What Is CoreTech?

Samantha describes CoreTech as insurtech for policy administration systems: where insurtech and policy admin come together and share the same DNA. It has three key elements:

• Cloud-native, not cloud-enabled. The system was built for the cloud, not adjusted from legacy technology to run there.
• No big-bang upgrades. Instead of expensive, resource-heavy upgrades, carriers get an upgrade every three weeks, so there’s no such thing as a version: they are always on the current one.
• Architecture for the future. APIs, microservices, containers and event-based workflow to support new business models and customer expectations on a single platform.

“Modern Legacy”

Asked how EIS differs from other core vendors, Samantha tried to answer as an analyst. When she began covering the market, there were around 26 end-to-end core policy administration technologies in North America. What is hard to see, she said, is what is under the hood. Many vendors describe themselves as modular, but have created a layer that makes them cloud-enabled and digital while the original legacy modules lie underneath, which she calls modern legacy: modernization on top, legacy beneath. In a CoreTech environment, the house is built on a more modern, open API and microservices foundation, so carriers can combine services in whatever way works and connect with insurtechs and other ecosystem partners.

Gilad added a story from his time at Farmers, which had at least three core system providers across business units on top of the COBOL and IBM legacy, and compared migrating to jumping between two trains at 300 kilometers an hour.

Why Digital Transformation Needs a Core

The industry, Samantha argued, has taken an outside-in approach: it fixed the agent experience, then the customer experience with web apps, portals and faster underwriting and issuance. But changes made five years ago are almost obsolete, and carriers can’t adopt new technology because of legacy constraints. What’s needed is a core, the digital heart, without which you can’t grow the digital arms and legs. A CoreTech core lets a carrier swap underwriting methods when new data becomes available, or add an insurtech, without outgrowing the system.

That matters for the ecosystem: if you want to connect to intermediaries, new insurtechs or partners, legacy systems can’t do it easily. The goal, in her word, is a frictionless experience, and not only for customers: for agents, underwriters, claims staff and the prospect who hasn’t been thought of yet.

Bundles and a Customer Core

Samantha’s example: if you only sell life and annuities, and millennials want a single insurer for everything, bundles with pet insurance or auto require connecting to partners. MetLife can sell everything, but has hundreds of systems because it grew over 100 years. A new entrant wants one platform that can do it all. EIS breaks its platform into reusable core components (customer core, billing, policy and so on) that are line-of-business, country and cloud agnostic, and a microservice for pet insurance or for an auto partner feeds data back into the customer core, giving a true 360-degree customer view.

The biggest risk, she said, isn’t the technology but not having people who know what to do with the data. She talked about building “frenemies”: partners who are no longer enemies, which is where bundles come from. Gilad suggested a new role, a head of ecosystem, because data and partners spread across business units need holistic coordination. Samantha agreed, and said the customer core is that umbrella: she cited a client with a bank as well as insurance subsidiaries that pulls data from all lines to market proactively to clients and non-clients.

Giving the Agent Some Love

Life insurance is sold, not bought, so agents matter. Gilad asked what a retail agent who doesn’t care about APIs gets out of CoreTech. Samantha’s answer: the same benefits customers already got. Customers can fill out and submit online, while the agent’s process has barely changed, with handwritten forms, re-keying into a VPN-based system, and “not in good order” rates that cost the carrier. She calls for persona-based applications, where the agent has an app that shows tasks, connects to a CRM, communicates with the underwriter, and checks addresses and health data in the background, perhaps running MIB, prescription, LexisNexis and credit checks and approving the application instantly, so the agent can click the button and show the price. The underwriter and claims staff have their own functionality, with the same look and feel, and the data lets agents see the next best product to offer.

Advice: Grey’s Anatomy

For her recommendation, Samantha said she watched all of Grey’s Anatomy from the beginning with her kids, which is about 17 seasons, and she doesn’t necessarily recommend it, but it’s a good, brainless drama. Gilad has been working through murder series with his wife, and joked they’re now in Melbourne.

Key Takeaways

• CoreTech is cloud-native, with upgrades every three weeks, and built on APIs, microservices and event-based workflow.
• “Modern legacy” means a modern layer on top of legacy modules, which can’t deliver the same flexibility.
• A policy admin core is the digital heart; without it, outside-in fixes become obsolete.
• A line-of-business agnostic customer core supports bundles and a 360-degree view, but the real risk is lacking the people who can use the data.
• A head of ecosystem could coordinate partners and data across business units.
• Agents need persona-based apps that give them the speed and accuracy customers already get.