Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Introduces New Insurance Technology Platform; "Connected Insurance Enterprise" Solution Expected to Significantly Reduce Costs.

Business & High Tech Editors

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 14, 2002

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, one of the world's largest technology and management consulting firms, today announced it has launched the Connected Insurance Enterprise (CIE) -- the first fully integrated end-to-end, pre-configured platform engineered to help life insurance brokers maximize sales, enhance the lifetime value of their customers and streamline operational and processing costs.

The company formally unveiled the new solution at the Annual Conference of the American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI) being held in San Diego on October 13-15.

CIE is targeted specifically to life insurance companies that are faced with complex industry challenges and are under intense pressure to increase their wealth management capabilities. Life insurance companies must expand their product offerings and shorten product development cycles to meet increased customer demands for investment advisory services. CIE was designed to enable and help life insurance companies meet those objectives.

"As insurance carriers transform their distribution channels to act as financial advisors, they are facing many of the same wealth management issues of other financial services companies," said Scott McConnell, vice president, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, US LLC, who managed the development of CIE.

"For insurance companies that implement CIE, it will mean more efficient and enhanced service that will include integration across the various channels customers and producers use to obtain service from the carrier," McConnell added.

Solution Benefits

CIE employs an alert-based management system and more efficient back office operations. This helps life insurance companies reduce operational costs by as much as 30 percent, improve cross-channel communication, increase customer and asset retention rates, and maximize revenues by delivering superior customer service. Additional benefits for insurers include:

- Retain customers and help them to preserve more assets by applying technology that observes customer activity and notifies the producer when those activities occur.

- Manage customer and producer inquiries quickly and efficiently across all sales, marketing and service channels.

- Allow agents to focus on selling and relationship building by shifting fulfilment and service functions to self-service or centralized service through the carrier.

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young's early testing and experience with CIE indicates that producer-productivity can increase by as much as 30 percent through increased cross selling, targeted marketing campaigns delivering quality leads, and acceleration of new product introduction.

Technology and Architecture

Created with the customer's needs in mind, CIE is engineered to bring together proven software and technology from world-class partners. In turn, it helps to address and add value to a host of issues facing life insurance firms, including product administration, financial management, and reporting and infrastructure.

An important characteristic of the CIE solution is the integration platform upon which it is built. IBM WebSphere Business Integration was selected as the business integration platform for the CIE solution because of its market leadership, its commitment to open standards, and architecture for process integration. In addition, the insurance edition of WebSphere Business Integration delivers the unique capability to integrate a broad range of diverse applications and business processes specific to the insurance industry.

"With IBM WebSphere Business Integration providing the integration infrastructure for CIE, customers will have a proven integration platform for their business processes and the infrastructure to accelerate their insurance automation initiatives," said Doug Brown, director, product marketing, Software Group, Solutions & Strategy, IBM.

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young designed and built the CIE solution at one of its 30 Advanced Development Centers (ADC) located across the country. The ADC environment allows Cap Gemini Ernst & Young to speed up the delivery of reliable technology platforms for clients, while minimizing development costs and time to market.

About Cap Gemini Ernst & Young

The Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Group is one of the largest management and IT consulting organizations in the world. The company offers management and IT consulting services, systems integration, and technology development, design and outsourcing capabilities on a global scale to help businesses continue to implement growth strategies and leverage technology in the new economy. The organization employs about 55,000 people worldwide and reports global revenues of about 8.5 billion euros (2000 pro forma). More information about individual service lines, offices and research is available at www.us.cgey.com