Why Product Development Processes in Insurance and Financial Services Need to Change

Listen, We Need to Talk

Welcome to our new corporate blog.

The goal of this blog is to bring together a community of insurance and financial services professionals – across both business and IT – to exchange ideas on the key concepts and requirements needed to achieve enterprise product agility.

By enterprise product agility, we mean the ability to deliver the right products to the right customers at the right time.

Product agility is about:

• Putting a central product repository at the heart of your enterprise
• Making a fundamental shift from coding to configuring products
• The ability to integrate with all systems that consume product information

By inheriting and re-using common product components, product-agile insurers and financial services organizations can make product changes much easier and more efficiently – launching products to market up to 30% faster.

(For more on product agility, check out the recent SMA Perspective: “Product Management and Development: Fueling Top-Line Growth Through Insurance Product Agility.”)

A Game Changer

We believe enterprise product agility is a game changer. As we saw with the recent recession, market conditions, as well as distributor and customer demands, can change almost overnight. Our industry also faces a rising tide of regulatory pressure that may require more frequent product changes to ensure compliance. If it takes your organization 6-12 months to bring a new product to market, you may be moving too slowly.

With all due respect, current product development processes leave a lot of room for improvement. Our view is that insurers and financial services firms can – and must – do better. The burdens of legacy systems, hard-coded product information and time-consuming manual processes need to be overcome if our industry is to move forward.

While insurers and financial services companies have spent a lot of time and resources on initiatives like CRM, portals and core systems replacement, they’ve neglected a strategic competency for too long. Product development may be one of the few remaining areas of the business where real efficiency gains, expense reduction and competitive differentiation can still be achieved. Improving your product agility represents a “green field” for strategic investment and returns.

This is Exciting Stuff
Imagine having all of your product information centralized in a single location where a simple rate/price change can be made once and done – in a matter of days or even hours. Picture being able to enter a new market within just a few months.

Think about it this way:

• What if you could map your customer information with products so you could provide more customized and bundled products?
• What could IT accomplish if it didn’t have to spend most of its time on hard-coding product changes into multiple systems?
• What about gaining the ability to perform closed-loop analysis of product performance so you can feed that insight into the next cycle of product innovation?

These are just a few of the things you can do with product agility. We want to hear and learn from your real-world experiences and best practices in product development, product lifecycle management, dynamic product bundling and relationship pricing, portfolio rationalization and core system replacement.

How long does it typically take your organization to bring a new product to market? How long would you like it to take? How would you rate the agility of your core systems and how satisfied are you with your current product development processes? How much manual effort is required to bundle products due to limitations with existing systems?

So let’s start the dialogue.

– Ross Orrett, President  & CEO

"Product development may be one of the few remaining areas of the business where real efficiency gains, expense reduction and competitive differentiation can still be achieved." - Ross Orrett, President & CEO