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Capita Life and Pensions Services Selects Sterling Commerce for Flexible Integration and Process Automation

The solution will enable Capita Life and Pensions Services to effectively administer and monitor the electronic exchange of policy and claims data with a range of insurance carrier customers. Through end-to-end visibility into actionable information across key IT and business processes, the company will achieve benefits such as faster system integration and reduced operational risk.

Capita Life and Pensions Services, the leading business process outsourcing provider for the UK pensions market, provides customer call centre and policy administration services to insurance carriers. It is responsible for the administration of approximately 22% of all UK life and pensions policies.

To expedite these services, the organisation needed a robust, expandable and secure enterprise-wide solution that provided full visibility and tracking of electronic business activity. Because of the diversity of the business environment, the chosen platform also needed to support multiple clients, databases, files and standards, while reducing operating costs and maintaining existing managed file transfer connections across legacy systems.

According to a Gartner report, legacy systems continue to be the largest challenge facing European insurers in 2009. The report also recommends investment in applications and tools, such as business process management (BPM), service oriented architecture (SOA) tools, web services and application integration tools, to support organisational connectivity and STP. Organisational silos must be erased and processes must be transparent and seamless.

Having tighter system-to-system connectivity and the ability to improve processes to match user needs will allow insurers to find greater return on investment for their software and to improve user satisfaction with core processes, such as policy issuance, billing and claims.

Steve Parkinson, joint CEO of Capita Life and Pensions Services, said: The ability to communicate with our current and future customer base, by bridging our technology to accommodate the diversity of systems, data formats and processes that they use, is vital to continue the success and future growth plans of Capita Life and Pensions Services. Sterling Integrator will provide the scalability we need to securely integrate new customers into our business operations, and ensure existing customers continue to benefit from an efficient and secure system.

Sterling Integrator will automate the flow of private and often sensitive personal insurance information between Capita Life and Pensions Services’ centralised policy administration system and customer carrier systems. By providing an end-to-end view of data and speeding up the flow of business information to all insurance sector clients, the company will improve the overall customer experience.

Richard Spong, financial services industry marketing manager of Sterling Commerce, said: The increasing complexity of multi-channel sales operations, industry consolidation and intensifying international competition have encouraged organisations such as Capita Life and Pensions Services to seek much-improved operating efficiency and cost reduction.

Improving the automation of complex and lengthy insurance processes across the company’s business community will reduce the number of man-hours and manual errors, significantly lowering IT risks and costs.

Through its powerful enterprise and B2B integration capabilities, Sterling Integrator enables companies to orchestrate business processes and manage high-volume electronic message exchange, complex routing, translation and flexible interaction with multiple internal systems and external business partners. Sterling Integrator is part of Sterling Business Integration Suite, a complete solution for all integration needs, inside and outside the enterprise.

To help companies to achieve seamless internal and B2B systems integration, Sterling Commerce has launched a series of video guides to business integration.