The power of the portal: Axa Financial's AXAonline and WebStation help nearly 125,000 users find information instantaneously.

Key Points

* Axa Financial's retail portal AXAonline and its new Internet system WebStation are currently reaching nearly 125,000 customers, advisers and other intermediaries.

* Axa Financial was able to reuse technology, including 80% to 90% of the parts, from AXAonline in creating its wholesale channel portal, WebStation.

* Axa Financial reduced its total cost of ownership by as much as 50% by consolidating its e-commerce initiatives onto one platform infrastructure.

After grabbing a cup of coffee, Russell Fletcher begins each workday by logging onto Axa Financial's retail portal where he finds the latest news, updated client information, his daily commission activity report, business processing updates and e-mail messages.

Using AXAonline, Fletcher, an Axa Advisors financial professional, can retrieve in minutes information that used to take hours to gather from many sources and make more informed decisions on behalf of clients. The online portal is the entry point to Axa Financial's new Internet-based WebStation. As an example of the value of this tool, Fletcher said he has been able to help a 34-year-old client realize substantial savings because he can now view his client's entire portfolio through WebStation and quickly identify the opportunity to apply values from one policy to some or all of the client's other eight policies--a result he expects will lower the client's 8% loan charge to 5% on some balances, eliminate most of his loans on a nontaxable event and reduce the client's premiums by nearly $500 a month.

At the 2000 A.M. Best Co. E-Fusion insurance and technology conference, an Axa Financial executive spoke about the company's goal to save its 7,500 advisers time and money with the new portal and WebStation. Axa's retail and wholesale portals now reach more than 100,000 clients and 25,000 brokers and advisers.

Going Online

Axa Financial's multimillion dollar c-commerce strategy is paying oft: Last year, 30% of the company's customer self-service financial transactions--including tracking variable account activity--were accomplished online, representing a significant savings to the company over using a call center. That is in contrast to the late 1990s when Axa's "static" Web site functioned primarily as a marketing brochure.

"In 1999, one of the areas we believed was underserved was our intermediaries," said Dave Wollin, group director of information technology for Axa Financial. At that time, the company was relying on its then 7-year-old agent workstation for its retail sales force. "We were ahead of the curve in rolling that out, but later recognized that the system was becoming outdated and because it was Windows based, it did not afford us the flexibility that Web-based computing brings," Wollin said.

The following year, AXAonline.com was created to serve clients and financial professionals. Axa built a "layered architecture" and opted for a Web-based portal to make it easier to provide role-based views of each audience. AXAonline continues to provide one public face with many audience-specific channels. Users connect to the system with a single log-on to access a variety of information sources including financial news, product information, educational materials, stock quotes and watch lists.

Seven months in the making, AXAonline was first rolled out to retail associates who now log in more than 40 times each month. A few months later Axa rolled out a second portal for its wholesale distributors, reusing the underlying portal technology in AXAonline.

"As our company has moved beyond the world of life insurance to become a full-service financial services company, we have multiple product systems that need to be integrated and presented to our clients and intermediaries," said Steve Wardwell, assistant vice president and AXAonline business design manager. The Web allows users, at their convenience, to take separate back-end systems and present them all in one space for clients so they can log in and get account access to all kinds of information, he said.

The second key component to Axa's portal strategy is WebStation, a $20 million transformation of Axa's existing associate technology platform, which is being rolled out across the country. WebStation, powered by Siebel Systems, connects Axa's associates to all their client and product information, as well as tools designed to promote revenue-generating opportunities and improve productivity. Early responses are positive, said Mark Wutt, senior vice president for sales implementation and support.

"The sales process and services agents require are virtually unchanged from what they were years ago, so the development of this approach is not in response to agents having different needs than they had before, but rather it's the availability of tools that can extract data out of the nooks and crannies of insurance IT systems and make it available," said Craig Weber, an analyst with Celent Communications' insurance practice.

The system provides associates fast and easy access to new business transactions and requirements, customer suitability reviews, national and regional communications and compensation information and calculators. It has become an everyday staple for John Siracusa, an Axa Advisors' associate. "I've told everyone in my office that they can select either not to use it or use it to the tidiest degree, but if they don't embrace it, they will be left behind."

This summer, Axa Financial plans to enhance its portal capabilities by allowing clients to pay premiums online.

Tried and True

Axa's online clients tend to be more affluent, own more products, have more investable assets, and have purchased products from the company more recently, Wollin said. "This demographic is right in the sweet spot of our most profitable customers. We think we're doing a good job of helping them--but not to the exclusion of everyone else--because anyone with Internet access can enjoy a full suite of services."

While there were some bumps in the road, the moves to AXAonline and WebStation were relatively seamless. The biggest challenge was filtering the images to illustrate the rich content so all applications would perform well, Wollin said. In addition, optimizing performance to ensure a quality user experience every time also posed a challenge, he said. But the company performed what Wollin calls "pre-production and production readiness testing" and only had to roll back one or two pieces of the systems before their rollout.

Relationships and Resources

The e-commerce initiatives promote relationship management opportunities between clients and their advisers. "It's a unifying place, so we try to focus on this as more of a relationship building tool to augment the personal relationships that our advisers establish with their clients," said Wutt. The content, planning tools and services available on AXAonline, he added, focus on needs-based analysis which fits with products and services associates provide to their clients.

In addition, the Web-based system removes the "human filter" found in traditional service processes, Celent's Weber said. "Self-service is all about taking calls out of the queue that would otherwise require expensive, personal interaction."

Axa Financial also reaps time and cost savings from its electronic document management system, eDOX--a Web-based application for distributing field communications and all applications, forms and sales collateral required for submitting new life, annuity and brokerage business. About 15,000 documents are now online for Axa's sales force to access via eDOX, which is also available through single sign-on from AXAonline, including product application forms, marketing materials, compliance-related updates and all types of communications from across the company. Axa no longer has to print and mail thousands of daily copies of documents for its field force or store documents, all resulting in significant cost savings.

Axa's portal is powered by Sun One Portal Server, Java System Directory Server, Java Systems Web Server, as well as J2EE and XML technologies residing on Sun servers running the Solaris operating system. Axa selected the Sun One Portal Server because of its scalable and flexible architecture, in addition to its ability to share data and the ability to rapidly deploy additional portals as needed, Wollin said.

The company has been able to reuse technology from the system and reports a 80% to 90% reuse of the parts in creating its wholesale channel portal. "We have a good platform to begin with and this is a further demonstration that the technology is solid and so is the whole business proposition behind it," said Wollin. The company repurposed a significant portion of the content of its first portal and reduced the deployment time of the second portal to seven weeks vs. the seven months it took to deploy the first portal. In addition, the reusability of the Sun One platform allowed Axa Financial to deploy the business-to-business wholesale portal in approximately 40% of the time it would normally take to build. Wollin also said Axa reduced its total cost of ownership by as much as 50% by consolidating its e-commerce initiatives on one platform infrastructure.

Testament to Success

AXAonline received Digital Consulting Inc.'s 2004 Best Enterprise Portal Application award for the design and deployment of its portal initiative and the 2002 RealWare award for the design and deployment of the platform. Industry standard security precautions are used to create a highly secure, encrypted environment.

To tailor the system to the intended users, Axa Financial formed a field technology advisory council comprising different constituencies from its field force. Each member provided valuable input into the direction of the overall initiative as well as substantive input into the detailed deliverables. The council's input was then integrated into the design process and the end results. The council continues to meet periodically to enhance the systems further to meet users' needs.

AXAonline at a Glance

* More than 100,000 of Axa's several million clients are now registered to AXAonline.

* In 2003, clients performed more than 425,000 online transactions and downloaded more than 230,000 forms.

* Axa projects a 20% to 30% growth rate for 2004.

* Across all its Internet properties, Axa delivered about 53 million page views, or about 1 million page views a week, via the portal.

* About 24,000 third-party brokers rely on the system.

* An online sales tool assists producers with asset allocation, sales illustrations and annuity applications.

Learn More

Axa Financial A.M. Best Company # 06341 (Equitable)

Distribution: General Agents/Brokers

For ratings and other financial strength information about this company, visit www.ambest.com.