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Success Stories
PRUDENTIAL UK
HIGHLIGHTS
Solution:
Customer Experience Management Product:
BEA WebLogic Integration™ 8.1
BEA WebLogic Workshop™ 8.1
Goal: technology WebLogic Edition
Industry:
Financial Services
CUSTOMER BRIEF
Established in 1848, Prudential plc is today a
leading international financial services company
with some 16 million customers, policy holders
and unit holders and some 20,000 employees
worldwide. In the UK, Prudential is a leading
life and pensions provider with around seven
million customers. M&G was acquired by
Prudential in 1999 and is the Group’s UK and
European fund manager, responsible for managing
over £111 billion of funds (December
2003). Launched by Prudential in 1998, Egg is
an innovative financial services company, with
over three million customers, with nearly six
per cent of UK credit card balances. In Asia,
Prudential is the leading European life insurer
and in the US, Prudential owns Jackson National
Life, a leading life insurance company.
BUSINESS PROCESS CHALLENGE
Prudential UK and European Insurance provides
a range of financial products and services including
annuities, corporate pensions, with-profits
and unit-linked bonds, savings and investments,
protection and equity release products. Its products
are distributed through a number of
channels including direct to customers (telephone,
Internet, and mail), through financial
advisers, business to business (consulting actuaries
and benefit advisers), and partnerships (affinities
and banks).
Prudential UK is aggressively targeting the fast
expanding 20,000-strong UK financial adviser market with a range
of solutions. Until recently
though, the company was relying on a fragmented
technology platform to support this important user
community. Although there was a multichannel strategy
in place, the information that Prudential UK needed
to effectively serve financial advisers lay across multiple
separate, stovepipe systems, including two Microsoft
IIS web server farms and an iPlanet/WebSphere
server farm.
“We have strong growth ambitions among financial
advisers,” says Jon Cross, Head of eBusiness, in Pru-
Tech, which is Prudential UK’s IT, Division. “It’s
the
most advanced channel of Prudential UK’s business
and we want to increase the number of services we
provide them.To do this, we needed to deliver endto-
end electronic processing.When an adviser contacts
us using their preferred channel, we want to be able
to create an illustration or a quote electronically,
automatically track that submission and manage the
contract with the adviser following the sale.”
There were other challenges to achieving this joinedup,
integrated finance model. Firstly, Prudential UK
also had to integrate to a number of additional 3rd
party information sources, such as The Exchange’s
Sapphire platform,Assure Web, and other portals.
Secondly, margins were becoming increasingly tight
in the insurance market and Prudential UK needed to
apply automation to reduce the cost of sale.Thirdly,
the financial adviser market was changing. Until now,
an intermediary was either an independent financial adviser or
an appointed representative of the insurance
company.
Soon, financial advisers will be allowed to ‘multi-tie’ to
several back-end product providers.To secure a partnership
with these ‘multi-tie’ advisers, Prudential UK must
visibly demonstrate an effective deployment of technology.“ It
was a tall order, but we knew we needed a robust integration platform,
offering seamless scalability,” says Cross.
SOLUTION
With these challenges in focus, PruTech turned to
BEA and Focus. Prudential UK was already using
Focus’ goal: technology, an XML User Interface
development tool, to build and deploy electronic life,
pensions and investment online forms for the industry
portals, and had already deployed BEA WebLogic
Server® and BEA WebLogic PortalTM to create an
industrial-strength application infrastructure for its
call center applications.
Today, approximately 800 customer services staff,
throughout the UK and India, rely on BEA WebLogic
Server and BEA WebLogic Portal to access customer
information for a large number of the company’s
product lines.The application, named ‘4Front /OCDB’ (Operational
Customer Database), also serves as a central customer information
hub and aligns with
related efforts for cross-sell and up-sell, campaign
management and Prudential UK’s enterprise data
warehouse.
“Our experience with BEA was highly successful
on our 4Front programme, but we still conducted
an evaluation of BEA WebLogic Integration, Microsoft
BizTalk and IBM WebSphere,” explains Jeremy Gray,
PruTech’s Head of IT Architecture.“We chose BEA
WebLogic Integration for several reasons. It enabled
us to leverage the existing BEA WebLogic Server and
BEA WebLogic Portal investment, and develop on a
single technology stack.We also liked BEA WebLogic
Workshop because it enabled us to simplify our J2EE development.The
scalability of BEA WebLogic
Integration was also an important consideration.”
Using BEA WebLogic Integration, Prudential UK
has created a unified, flexible environment through
which to manage relationships with the 20,000 UK
financial advisers.When an adviser prepares an illustration
for a customer, they can submit that directly
to Prudential with no manual intervention.When
the customer signs-up for the policy, neither the financial
adviser nor the Prudential representative need
repopulate any of the screens with information.This
straight through, end-to-end processing environment
means that both the Financial Adviser and Prudential
maintain a complete record of the transaction. For
the time being, financial advisers can submit investment
bond transactions to Prudential, although this
will be extended to life insurance policies in the
near future.
“BEA WebLogic Integration provides Prudential UK
with a modern, scalable aggregation hub,” says Gray. “The
robust application framework delivers rapid, open integration and
manages our processes highly
efficiently.”
Speed to market is an essential requirement to remain
competitive in the financial services industry and
Prudential UK selected Focus Solutions’ goal:technology,
a BEA partner technology, to enable rapid application
development of user interfaces for their electronic
products. goal:technology allows Prudential UK to
efficiently build, view, and manage the user interfaces
of their electronic protection products for deployment
via their adviser channels, www.pruifa.co.uk, and the
industry adviser portals.
“Providing Advisers with the capability to trade electronically
with Prudential UK is key to our distribution
strategy. Using Focus’ technology in collaboration with
BEA WebLogic Integration will enable us to reuse our
e-commerce solutions across multiple channels including
the Adviser portals and www.pruifa.co.uk, reducing
our maintenance costs, and centralizing content and
change control,” comments Cross.
The combined goal:technology and BEA solution
allows advisers to complete new business applications online, and
submit them electronically to Prudential
UK via an industry portal or directly via the Internet.
RESULTS
According to Cross, there are benefits ‘on both sides
of the screen’.“Our original goal was to target
financial advisers with a compelling service experience
and BEA WebLogic Integration helps us achieve
that.When a proposal is submitted to us, the system
validates the document online and asks relevant
questions. If a question has been answered incorrectly,
or if a response is missing, the problem is immediately
fixed at source. If we were still using paper, we’d be
going back and forth to the financial adviser, wasting
time and effort as well as delaying the policy. Previously,
up to 40 percent of application forms were returned
to us because of errors or clarifications.The browser
environment eliminates almost all of these.”
On the Prudential UK side of the screen, the company
is reaping the rewards of a flexible, dynamic application
environment.The open architecture has allowed the
developers to re-use a considerable number of modules:
the legacy life and pensions contract enquiries system
from the 4Front /OCDB has been re-deployed for the
financial adviser community, for example.
“BEA WebLogic Integration and BEA WebLogic
Workshop, combined with Focus Solutions’ goal:
technology, have reduced the cost of Prudential UK’s
development,” says Gray.“We now have the flexibility
and agility we need to respond faster and more effectively
to customers needs with a single, unified environment,
geared to adapting to market change.”
ABOUT BEA
BEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BEAS) is a world
leader in enterprise infrastructure software, helping
enable companies to improve business responsiveness
through service-oriented architecture (SOA),
a software design approach that more closely aligns
IT with business objectives.With 15,000 customers
worldwide including the majority of the Fortune
Global 500, BEA and its WebLogic® and Tuxedo® brands
are among the most trusted names in business technology. Headquartered
in San Jose, Calif.,
BEA has 75 offices in 36 countries.
More information
on BEA products and services is available at
www.bea.com.
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