Closing the book on legacy

For several years, a major UK-based insurer had been undergoing a major transformation and modernization effort, a large part of which was a complete reorganization of its portfolio. The decision was made to split the portfolio into two areas: the existing business and new digital services.

The existing business (EB) portfolio was problematic because it largely consisted of older, closed book insurance policies with no new sales but requiring maintenance until maturation — sometimes decades later.

These EB operations were largely legacy based, were not customer friendly, and had high administration costs that would only grow over time. The insurer needed a partner capable of reducing the cost of administration for these closed books and developing a roadmap to modernize the portfolio.

Making a clean split

Based on a longstanding partnership, the insurer chose Atos to take over as custodian of the EB portfolio. Atos would be responsible for delivering end-to-end portfolio and policyholder services in accordance with all applicable regulations.

The companies began with a consultation among Atos and the insurer’s business leaders. They developed an overall strategy and plan to transform high-cost legacy applications that were running the customer-facing portal. They decided that the best course of action was to split the applications and create independent Pega instances for the EB and digital services portfolios.

Then, they began migrating Pega solutions from the existing on-premises environment to a more scalable, cost-effective digital private cloud. The legacy applications will be gradually re-platformed to the cloud using Pega and API orchestration to replicate the business logic and functionality.

A solution for the long run

This strategic move has enabled the insurer to achieve greater stability and reduced risk for its entire EB portfolio. Atos has been engaged to manage all operations and IT services for the next 15 years, providing lower, more consistent, more predictable costs for a key part of the business.

The modernization efforts are moving forward, with more than 5,300 business processes to be modernized and re-platformed in the coming years. Because the entire portfolio is being standardized on one of the insurer’s key enterprise platforms, it will provide much needed long-term consistency and interoperability.

In addition, the insurer and Atos are exploring opportunities to execute similar business process re-platforming efforts for other important functions like claims, servicing, protection and complaints.