SDT, the insurance administration solutions specialist in the JSE AltX-listed SilverBridge group, has completed implementation of its flagship solution Exergy at La Prudence, one of Mauritius's leading insurers.
As a consequence, La Prudence is geared for growth, rapid product development, enhanced customer service, cross-selling and increased market share in the Mauritian market.
Founded in 1989, La Prudence is Mauritius's second largest insurer, underwriting a variety of long-term insurance contracts, including life, pension, and long-term illness. These risks are reinsured with Gen Re, a triple A-rated reinsurance company, and part of Berkshire Hathaway.
La Prudence also provides a range of short-term insurance products (fire, accident, motor, engineering, marine, health). It receives reinsurance support from a consortium of well-known international re-insurers, led by Munich Re, the largest re-insurer in the world.
La Prudence found its existing system hindered business development. It had become a challenge to implement necessary product and system changes or to add new products to the old system. This made it hard for La Prudence to keep pace with the introduction of competitive offerings in the Mauritian life assurance market, and to maintain adherence to changing regulatory requirements.
Globally, financial service providers, and specifically, life assurers and retail investment product providers, are seeking to minimise the cost of administration without compromising service levels or agility and flexibility so as to take innovative products to market quickly.
“As an industry, insurance needs to learn from the lessons of other industries and boost productivity,” says Gawie Erasmus, COO of SDT. "Insurers need to cut time to market while boosting quality, reducing complexity and empowering employees to deliver the best service at the lowest possible cost.
"This can only be achieved through an innovative approach at all levels of an organisation. At SDT, we had the solution that met all these criteria for La Prudence.”
More than a supplier
"La Prudence was also looking for more than a system supplier. It wanted a relationship with an organisation that could assist it, and grow with the business and its relationships with external parties. Its ideal solution had to support more areas of the business than before: individual life as well as standalone loans administration. Beforehand, its separate business lines were administered on different systems. This approach was inherently inefficient and increased the cost of product administration, it could not support effective cross-selling and it was costly to maintain."
With Exergy, La Prudence can administer all individual life products and group schemes, along with loans and pensions.
This leads to a further benefit: for the first time La Prudence gains a single, unified view across a customer's total portfolio, and having access to all the relevant customer information from one view can substantially improve customer service; it is also the first step to effective cross- and up-selling.
The next step for SDT is to assist La Prudence to become more autonomous, and enable the IT team to configure product rules and develop code corresponding to the Exergy modules.
"This has been a true validation of our approach to software development and implementation," says Erasmus. "To be able to implement and support a customer in a location as far off as Mauritius shows we can implement it for any insurer, anywhere in the world."
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