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Pegasystems (Cambridge, Mass.) has introduced Group Benefits Underwriting, an offering the vendor describes as providing insurers with a complete underwriting application that delivers a consolidated view of all work-in-process and supports all group underwriting needs. Timed to the growth in group business opportunities for insurers seeking growth, Pega characterizes the new software as an agile application needed to convert prospects into customers and capitalize on new opportunities.

Insurance carriers providing both traditional group benefits as well as the emerging market for voluntary offerings are increasingly challenged with aging infrastructures that hamper their ability to be flexible and keep pace with change and growth, according to Rob McIsaac, Senior VP of Research at Novarica. “The industry needs systems that will enable carriers to support growth with new products and service offerings while also allowing them to protect existing markets and preserve financial margins,” McIsaac comments. “Finding ways to enhance automation and extract business rules from existing systems can also be a critical component in successfully implementing new core solutions.”

The emerging group benefits market is characterized by shifting regulations and demographic changes that add complexity for carriers trying to improve customer service and increase profitability, according to Chris Blatchly, VP and Global Insurance Business Line Leader at Pegasystems. “Our new application helps carriers adapt to rapidly changing market opportunities, with the power to operationalize analytics and apply them in risk selection and evaluation when faced with increasing mountains of data,” he says.

Those capabilities enable Pega Group Benefits Underwriting to help carriers manage, underwrite and price risks with greater accuracy, according to a vendor statement. Leveraging the Pega Next-Best-Action technology within the application, carriers can execute data-driven strategies in line with profitability measures and targeted growth while increasing customer satisfaction and retention, the vendor statement asserts.

Other benefits touted by the vendor include the ability to institutionalize and extend underwriting best practices across market segments, lines of business and distribution channels; and the ability to scale efficiently by improving underwriter productivity and collaboration. The vendor asserts that Pega Group Benefits’ dynamic case management guides the intake and renewal processes and provides visibility across the in-force book, while enabling an underwriting case to be worked on simultaneously by multiple parties to accelerate turnaround times. The new application also helps insurance carriers optimize and enhance complex operating environments and accelerate market and regulatory changes to align with underwriting best practices, the vendor claims.

Pegasystems says carriers using Pega Group Benefits Underwriting will be able to:

• Institutionalize and automate underwriting processes:  The new application ensures consistency by increasing underwriting automation with embedded rules, processes and workflow.
• Standardize underwriting rules: Pega helps accelerate time-to-market with a single repository for underwriting rules that can be easily configured and reused across lines of business, products and geographies. With Pega, carriers can quickly extend underwriting support across all channels of interaction.
• Engage intelligent underwriting processes: Carriers can leverage intelligent processes and automated guidance to reduce training time and ensure consistency. Carriers can automatically embed functionality including underwriting authority management, appetite rules and underwriting guidelines directly within the underwriting process.
• Automate case installation: All data collected during the underwriting process can be easily formatted to automate the case installation process with the plan design selected by the customer. Manual steps can be eliminated to ensure the plan implemented is the same as the plan sold.

The vendor reports that Pega Group Benefits Underwriting is built on the Pega 7 platform. With Pega 7’s visual tools, businesses can easily extend and change the application to meet their strategic business needs, Pegasystems claims. The vendor asserts that Pega 7’s proven scalability ensures the application can scale to run across the volume of users and variations in business lines, geographies and channels that today’s global insurers demand.