Alliance Insurance Company had its beginnings in 1991 as one of two short-term insurers in Lesotho.
The company initially focused on short-term commercial and personal insurance products, but later expanded its portfolio to include selected life policies, including pension fund administration, individual life products, credit life products, group schemes, group life assurance and investment products.
Starting with five employees, Alliance now employs over 35 people and has increased its turnover tenfold in the last decade while maintaining the desired levels of profitability and launching a well received social responsibility programme.
The challenge
Starting out as a small company, Alliance was able to manage its portfolio of products and clients via spreadsheet-based systems it created specifically for its employees. Given the growth of the company since its modest beginnings, this approach had become more cumbersome and difficult to maintain, especially in the Life Administration department.
Moreover, new legislation in Lesotho requiring better data management and reporting forced the company to look for alternatives to this manual system.
"Our existing Microsoft Excel system could no longer cater for the improved and more complex products we offered the market and it was increasingly difficult to launch new products," says Thabiso Madiba, GM of Life Administration at Alliance Insurance. "More than that, it could also no longer manage the increasing customer volumes as we continued to expand rapidly. Worse still, it was no longer user-friendly, cost-effective or efficient and any form of customer relationship management was difficult."
Customer service suffered as a result of the manual system, as queries on policy values or the effects of premium increases or decreases took too long to answer. This was no longer acceptable to Alliance's management.
"For any company in the insurance industry, it is critical to maintain efficient operations and to smoothly and inexpensively provide customers with products and support," says Freda du Toit, director of SDT Financial Software Solutions. "Also important is being able to fulfil on the promises made to customers, building solid relationships with them and gain their trust in the products and services offered."
Alliance therefore needed to find a suitable application to replace its manual administration system and approached SDT.
The solution
Alliance made the decision to implement the Amsolf application from SDT in a deal worth R1.2 million.
Madiba says the new system provided Alliance with a stable system that improved the company's financial and reporting capabilities, "and gave us more control over building and improving relationships with our customers. Furthermore, SDT Amsolf is the only system powerful enough to provide full life insurance administration capabilities at a price smaller companies can afford."
SDT Amsolf is an off-the-shelf solution administration solution that supports all processes within a life assurance company according to global standards for assurance products, processes and systems. SDT simply configured the existing processes in the system to meet Alliance's requirements.
Moreover, SDT Amsolf is easy to implement and use and ensures the company's data integrity is maintained at all times, allowing the organisation to focus in its core competency and effectively compete in the global market on product and superior service.
All Alliance users in the Life Administration department were trained in the effective use of the application by SDT. Furthermore, any maintenance and support required are provided by SDT from its headquarters in Pretoria.
The benefits
Because Amsolf is an off-the-shelf application, configuring the system to Alliance's needs was quick and easy. Du Toit says the greatest effort in the implementation process was spent on training staff. This meant the system was up and running, playing a productive role in the company in a short period of time.
"SDT Amsolf has empowered Alliance Insurance to bed down its administrative processes and improve its overall ability to do business," adds Du Toit. "Not only is the system easy to use, but information is available to Alliance employees at the touch of a button, improving customer service substantially. Claims and queries are now dealt with faster and more accurately than ever, while policy values can be supplied immediately.
"Moreover, the company no longer has to concern itself with its IT administrative processes or the integrity of its data since SDT Amsolf takes care of these issues while users focus on their jobs."
A further enhancement Alliance is planning is to integrate SDT Amsolf with its existing General Ledger module. The integration exercise will streamline Alliance's accounting process by incorporating data directly from existing policy information instead of having to waste time re-capturing it.
SDT Amsolf is also an ideal platform from which to launch the next growth phase of Alliance's business. Launching new products will be easier as they can be easily incorporated into the system as they are launched. Additionally, should Alliance need to expand the range of SDT products is uses as its business grows, it can do so by simply slotting them into the existing Amsolf installation without concerns of incompatibilities or duplication of data.
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