By the Book

Across the insurance industry, carriers are facing increased competition, ongoing market turbulence and lingering financial headwinds. Internally, they are modernizing outdated technology infrastructures and integrating siloed data repositories as they seek transformation of key customer- and market-facing operations. In navigating this challenging landscape, leading carriers are pursuing multiple routes to performance improvement and increased profitability. Specifically, forward-looking carriers are operationalizing detailed product architectures -- composed of product structures, rules and data entities -- by establishing enterprise product catalogs. These catalogs are capable of transforming how insurers rate, quote, book, issue and service policies. The growing interest in product catalogs is an acknowledgment that policy administration systems are ill-suited to "own" product definitions across the enterprise. Rapidly increasing customer expectations and the need for more agile, nimble product development capabilities to meet those expectations are also business drivers.