System Migrations of Life Insurance Contracts: DON’T JUST MIGRATE
In recent years, insurance companies have been exposed to a lot of challenges. These make them reflect on serving their customers that have been a client for many years and years to come. Life insurance contracts are typically underwritten for a very long duration and in times that technology and legal requirements were very different from today. Technological solutions also become outdated after a while and the experts that knew everything about those old products or systems are increasingly retiring. Because of these evolutions companies are either migrating their legacy portfolios to newer systems or are selling these to other parties that consequently move these portfolios to their systems.
The essence of a migration is the transfer of the data from one (old) management platform to another (new) management platform. It is said that the data must be extracted from the source system, then transformed so that it can be uploaded into the target platform. The migrated life insurance contracts are then further managed on the target platform.
The art of migrating is to ensure that ultimately all parties involved benefit from it. After the migration, the life insurer should be able to offer a preferably better service at a preferably lower management cost.
We take the position that this goal can be achieved by not only migrating life insurances data-technically. In many cases, it is best to also renew the underlying life insurance technique of the life insurance contracts, so that the migrated life insurance policies are more in line with the calculation and management techniques of the target management platform. The contractual rights of policyholders or beneficiaries must not be prejudiced. After all, a life insurance contract cannot be unilaterally changed by an insurer at any point, certainly not because of a migration to a new management platform.
Organised by the EAA – European Actuarial Academy.
Participants
This seminar is suited for all actuaries who want to learn more about migrating life insurance contracts between admin systems and how you can migrate with a whole other mindset.
Technical requirements
Please check with your IT department if your firewall and computer settings support web session participation (the programme Zoom will be used for this online training). Please also make sure that you are joining the web session with a stable internet connection.
Purpose and Nature
During the seminar, the aforementioned will be concretely illustrated based on a migration of a very diverse classic life insurance portfolio (with guaranteed life and/or death performance in various combinations). On the one hand, we will go over the different steps (actuarial and non-actuarial- in a migration project and on the other hand, we will demonstrate how this portfolio can a) be migrated to a modern generic cash-flow-driven management platform (universal life + unit linked), and b) at the same time the life insurance policies can also be renewed. During the seminar participants will understand that the underlying renewal is fundamental to make the migration a real success: both for the insurer and for the policyholders and beneficiaries.
Although the aforementioned will be illustrated from Belgian practice, we believe that this innovative migration strategy is useful, relevant and innovative in many other countries.
Language
The language of the web session will be English.
Lecturer
Luc Kesters is a consulting life actuary and the last 20 years he’s working with Vereycken & Vereycken, a Belgian based insurance software development and consultancy company, on actuarial and IT related jobs with a strong focus on life insurance portfolio migrations.
