Since 2003, the landscape has changed significantly
for P/C policy administration systems. First year TCO has dropped
significantly in lockstep with a major influx of newer technologies such
as .NET, Java, SOA, Web services, and ACORD XML. Implementation times have
grown shorter as vendors make use of new technologies and their own
improved experience levels. A number of vendors have cropped up in the
last few years that have survived and even thrived. The majority of
solutions are considerably better today at what they do today than they
were two years ago.
"Quite simply, it’s a great time for P/C
carriers to be considering a new PAS as features critical to ROI— such
as CRM and data mining—become relatively standard features in these
systems, even as prices drop, implementations become quicker, and vendor
options become more plentiful," comments Chad
Hersh, a senior analyst in Celent’s insurance group, and lead
author of the report.
Celent’s new report is designed to help insurers
understand this marketplace. The report contains detailed profiles of 24
commercial lines policy administration systems and limited profiles of 8
additional systems. The report also uses Celent’s new ABCD Vendor View,
which is a standard representation of a vendor marketplace designed to
show at a glance the relative positions of each vendor in four categories:
Advanced technology, Breadth of functionality, Customer
base, and Depth of client services. Unlike a simple
"four-quadrant" map, solutions in the upper right are not
necessarily the best solutions—in an area as complex and idiosyncratic
as policy admin, there is no one "best" for all cases. Insurers
should consider which factors in breadth, technology, experience, and
client service are most important to them, and use the profiles and
comparative tables in this report to generate their own shortlists. Only
fully-profiled vendors are included in the ABCD Vendor View.
The 24 vendors with full profiles are: Allenbrook,
AQS, AscendantOne, CGI (INSideOUT), Computer Sciences Corporation (POINT
IN), Delphi Technology, Duck Creek Technologies, ePolicy Solutions, Fiserv
Insurance Solutions (The Specialty System), Garvin-Allen, Infinity Systems
Consulting, INSTEC, Insurance Data Processing, Insuresoft, Insurity,
OneShield, P and C Insurance Systems, PCMS, Sapiens Americas, SunGard
Sherwood Systems (FrontTier), Systems Task Group, Tata Consultancy
Services, The Innovation Group, and Tritech Financial Systems.
Other vendors included in the report with limited
profiles include Accenture, CGI (GIOS), Fiserv (PolicyStar), CSC
(Exceed), Steel Card, Guidewire, InsureWorx (formerly Taliant), and
Sirius.
The report is 111 pages long and contains multiple
figures and tables. A table of contents is available here.
