Customer background:
Metropolitan Retail is a division of Metropolitan Holdings, the fourth largest Life Office in South Africa. Within the Retail business unit, a number of innovative financial services products are sold to the middle and upper income markets, catering for business and personal life insurance needs.
These products are administered on one of Retail's core systems that were inherited from the Odyssey Life business unit. The objective is to serve the needs of South Africans as they approach financial maturity, providing a wide range of products consisting of risk, investments and retirement products.
The company currently serves over 165 000 policyholders with a total of R3.2 billion assets under management.
Saratoga Software:
Saratoga Software is a leading niche software development company, dedicated to helping organisations gain strategic advantage through the development of customised software solutions. Saratoga Software designs and develops solutions for organisations that believe there is an advantage to having technology that specifically meets their needs.
Saratoga Software has a well-established record of success supplying and implementing large development projects and software products across a number of industries in the US and South Africa. Our services include architecture design and IT strategy, business analysis, project management, software development and support.
Business need
The Odyssey systems team, under the leadership of Roger Klein and Terry Haywood, were looking for a software development partner to work with them to assist and fast track the migration of components of the Odyssey legacy life insurance systems to .Net and SQL Server.
In addition, they were looking for a team that could leverage their skills and experience to validate the work and architecture that had developed by the in-house team and have an approach that would ensure delivery and facilitate skills transfer.
The solution
Saratoga Software provided a dynamic team to complement the client's resources. Key to our success was creating a joint team that would enjoy working together and would speed up delivery and learn from each other.
Saratoga's approach included providing prototyping and feasibility studies, architectural and best practice guidance as well as implementation of a Contractual Alterations system to form part of the broader Odyssey platform. The Contractual Alterations system is Web-based, facilitating head-office, branch and client access and features a data-driven Web forms interface to ensure the flexibility required to support both legacy and new products. The system interfaces to multiple back-end engines and services for calculation of premiums and commissions, client communications and workflow.
Our people and our rigorous approach to building enterprise solutions are very valuable to our partners and customers.
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