Introduction
As professionals who have worked in the insurance and retirement industries, we can attest that for today’s aging population, defined benefit pensions are a welcome source of financial security, especially for those about to retire, or have already retired. Insurers in the Pension Risk Transfer (PRT) market can offer the requisite guarantees, investment expertise, and risk management capabilities to the many boomers exiting the workplace who want to ensure that their pensions remain intact for the long term. But to do so, PRT providers must reckon with the challenges of transforming their current technologies to support the increasingly complex requirements of this market. We have grouped these challenges into three categories, namely:
- New case implementation;
- Case administration; and
- Data access and enrichment for advanced analytics.
To help PRT providers address these challenges and enable robust business growth, Vitech provides integrated digital administration for seamless operation and long-term success, through its market-leading, cloud-native V3locity solution.
The Challenges and V3locity Solutions
New Case Implementation
A frequently repeated process, namely onboarding and implementation in the PRT market, requires the precision and efficiency to handle large swaths of detailed data. In addition, census and other critical participant data from pension plan sponsors varies in format, quality, and consistency, requiring robust utilities for data loading, data scrubbing, and data comparison. Vitech provides these capabilities out of the box as part of V3locity’s benefit administration platform. V3locity’s robust capabilities also quickly and accurately capture all the pension plan contractual provisions and related business rules that drive pension administration activities for the full participant lifecycle. These include:
- Data Loading/Import of data in any file format
- Data Standardization/Re-formatting of submitted data sets for uploading
- Data Editing/Scrubbing to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the participant, benefit, and payment information
- Data Comparison for Consistency, to compare data across different files (benefit data, payer data, pricing data) to locate and reconcile data discrepancies
- Data Enrichment, to enrich and update participant data using third-party data sources
for address, gender, date of birth, date of death, and other relevant data
Case Administration
V3locity’s strengths are not only with case administration for loading accuracy, comparison, and enrichment, but also with robust digital administration capability via a closed loop, integrated approach for participant engagement, campaigns, and advanced reporting. In addition, V3locity’s sophisticated, ongoing outreach model offers a contemporary customer experience to achieve sustained engagement with plan participants. V3locity also provides deep and broad pension plan administration capabilities for Traditional Defined Benefit Plans and Cash Balance Plans. These are integrated with workflows, campaign management, digital self-service, documents and correspondence, and extensive APIs to streamline business processes and share tools that provide data across relevant departments and systems.
Data Access and Enrichment for Advanced Analytics
As we have noted, accurate and precise data is critical in the seamless operation and continued success of PRT providers. But PRT providers also need access to the data necessary to optimize the business, particularly participant retirement status, mortality, demographic, and behavior data. V3locity provides much easier access to data and data enrichment sources for the following:
- The retirement and mortality data that feeds important business intelligence for pricing, underwriting, valuation, and finance.
- More accurate data on the cost of administration used to refine pricing for new cases, based on the type of liability (e.g., deferred lives).
- Participant demographics and behaviors regarding retirement decisions can be used for resource planning for the in-force business and enable more accurate resource planning for new business.
- Access to the above data (retirement, mortality, demographic, participant behavior) enables the insurer to build deep expertise to price new business more aggressively and still meet financial return requirements.
Conclusion
To support ongoing PRT growth, V3locity’s provisions and rules-based engine, digital self-service and annuitant outreach, and 360-degree customer service capabilities combined deliver an outstanding customer experience. Vitech’s expert approach provides the closed loop, integrated digital administration benefits that PRT providers need to accelerate the growth of their businesses and improve their long-term competitive positioning.
TODD EYLER
Todd Eyler is Vice President of Strategic Marketing at Vitech Systems Group. He manages Vitech’s strategic marketing efforts including analyst relations, industry communications, competitive analysis, ecosystem partnerships, and thought leadership. Todd has held leadership positions at top-tier software companies and systems integrators and has extensive experience in identifying/analyzing market trends and aligning business priorities with the right technology.
ROBIN LENNA
Robin Lenna is Senior Vice President at Vitech Systems Group. She works with clients to develop and execute strategies that create competitive advantage and support growth through business, technology and operational transformation. Before joining Vitech System Group, Robin was an Executive Vice President at MetLife, responsible for insurance and retirement businesses with $10 billion in annual sales and $196 billion in assets. Robin has significant experience with insurance and retirement solutions, business transformation, investments, and risk management.
