Strong Step Forward for Life and Annuity SaaS Solutions

Every now and then a strategic alliance occurs that makes a lot of sense.Today, McCamish Systems, an InfoSys BPO company, and Pegasystems announced a strategic partnership that will leverage the best of both their solutions, namely, McCamish’s VPAS Life and Pegasystem’s BPM technology. (See http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20111207005172/en/McCamish-Systems-Infosys-BPO-Company-Announces-Strategic for full announcement.)McCamish VPAS Life is a policy administration system driving their BPO offering.VPAS Life provides full end-to-end processing from new business fulfillment and underwriting STP to claims.Pegasystems BPM technology is a robust BPM and case management solution providing configurable business process solutions, standards based integration solutions, strong rules capabilities and process metering and monitoring.

VPAS Life was evaluated in a recent Celent NA Policy Administration Systems report, with a solid showing in advanced technology, breadth of functionality and customer base.(See http://www.celent.com/reports/north-american-policy-administration-systems-2011-life-health-and-annuities-abcd-vendor-view for the full report.) However, it was also noted that “with a mature data model and an older code base, there are limitations to what can be achieved via configuration--for most applications, customized coding will be required.”In addition, while customer feedback was positive, the front-end, case management and workflow capabilities are not best of breed solutions.

Pegasystems has been a leader in the BPM and more recently case management solution space, providing a powerful, configurable platform on which to build insurance processes and applications. While they have provided a framework in which large insurers have begun to wrap and build core solutions through their Insurance Industry Framework, there is still a lot of work to do to create system of record core systems.In addition, due to the robustness of the framework, Pegasystems’ solutions require high level skill sets.

This all leads back to the McCamish-Pegasystems partnership.Each solution compliments the other’s perfectly to provide a potentially, industry leading, and possibly changing, life insurance and annuity solution.McCamish will leverage the Pegasystems framework to provide a configurable and powerful BPM, case management insurance framework to enhance their already strong insurance experience and solution.McCamish will be able to take advantage of the speed to market Pegasystem Insurance framework provides, addressing some of the hurdles that small to mid-size insurers face with framework solutions by providing it as a SaaS offering and through InfoSys already has a strong Pegasystem BPM center of excellence.

While the actual implementation is yet to completed, and thus true benefits realized, Celent views this alliance as a potential game-changing partnership that will greatly enhance the SaaS options for all insurers, but especially for small to mid-size carriers in the life insurance and annuity market.