Industry
Insurance
Reinventing the Insurance Industry with a Digital-first Strategy
Solution
TCS BaNCS™
TCS BaNCS™: Enabling Transformation in Banks and Financial Institutions
Highlights
- MLC Life Insurance (transitioning to Acenda*), through its transformation program, aimed to simplify a complex and fragmented enterprise technology environment and bring advanced digital capabilities to the company.
- Migration of seven different source systems to TCS BaNCSTM for Insurance digital core platform was accomplished between late 2017 and 2021, enabling MLC Life Insurance to consolidate 640 legacy products across three lines of business. The solution was hosted within MLCL Data Centres.
- TCS BaNCS for Insurance policy administration system was then successfully migrated to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in 2023 as a part of the MLCL Data Centre exit initiative and is now operated as a cloud-based managed service by TCS on behalf of MLC Life Insurance.
On this page
Overview
Cloud-based, modular, future-ready life insurance platform offers Australian insurer flexibility and performance strength, to help anticipate and address market opportunities and challenges.
The MLC Life Insurance brand emerged in 2016 as a stand-alone life insurance company after nearly 40 years of bank ownership (and 130 years of protecting Australians). In an increasingly competitive and regulated complex market, MLC Life Insurance embarked on a significant systems transformation initiative to support growth strategies and improve performance.
To attain these goals, MLC Life Insurance chose TCS to create a consolidated, modern and scalable operating environment to help reduce complexity and operating costs.
In late 2017, a transformation program was launched to:
- Simplify a legacy IT environment that was complex and fragmented;
- Enhance digital capabilities within the organization;
- Enable end-to-end automated processes and competencies to empower employees and increase their ability to engage with customers; and
- Support significantly improved customer experiences, including digital enablement.
In partnership with TCS and using TCS BaNCS for Insurance as a platform, MLC Life Insurance initiated a multi-year program to implement an innovative, flexible technology landscape.
Seven legacy core systems were consolidated onto the TCS BaNCS digital core system. Through this initial consolidation, MLC Life Insurance could operate its group and retail insurance businesses, as well as its open-book and closed-book businesses, on one platform.
Challenges
MLC Life Insurance’s technology and operations transformation was undertaken in an environment fraught with competitive and regulatory challenges.
Among many hurdles, the life insurer:
- Established itself as an independent entity (and addressed the financial and regulatory requirements associated with that transition);
- Underwent consolidation within the Australian life insurance and superannuation industry; and
- Met consumers' increasing preference for interaction via digital channels.
The complex technology landscape necessitated the transformation and modernization of multiple, disparate systems. Furthermore, MLC Life Insurance had all its processing power contained in data centers.
It had been challenging for MLC Life Insurance to execute its ambitious growth strategy, given its legacy infrastructure and fragmented operating environment. There was an urgent need for a business and technology model that would provide the flexibility and agility necessary to capitalize on opportunities, while keeping risks and costs under control.
Additionally, as one of Australia's largest providers of life insurance, the company was also required to maintain uninterrupted business operations during the transformation process.
Solution
The selection of TCS as MLC Life Insurance’s transformation partner allowed MLC Life Insurance to take advantage of TCS' deep understanding of the global insurance market, its local workforce, and comprehensive product suite.
In 2017, MLC Life Insurance and TCS began the large-scale, progressive program of legacy modernization and consolidation. Between 2017 to 2018, a modern, simplified, digital and integrated technology landscape centered around TCS BaNCS for Insurance was established through green-field implementations.
Next, seven different processing systems were successfully migrated between 2019 and 2021 to the new platform. More than 1,000 reporting devices and internal systems were migrated into a single operating model during this time.
TCS helped MLC Life Insurance with a digital front-end to modernize its systems and avoid disruptions for all customers, advisers and employees – allowing the company to continue to operate normally. Following the migration into the new ecosystem, TCS participated in all delivery streams created for stabilization of business and helped establish business-as-usual activities through 2021 and 2022.
Key capabilities of the TCS BaNCS for Insurance digital core include:
- Management of customer and stakeholder relationships
- New Business and Underwriting
- Policy, Unit and Group Insurance Administration
- Billing/Collection and Disbursement
- Insurance Accounting
- Agency Management and Commission Processing
- Claims
- Reinsurance
MLC Life Insurance recognized that to reap further benefits from its core platforms, a cloud-first approach was necessary and commenced the work to exit running technology from data centers.
Through a strategic partnership with Oracle, TCS directly supported MLC Life Insurance moving into a cloud-enabled and future-ready technology landscape, providing the tools, industry knowledge, and partnership ecosystem necessary to support the deployment of the TCS BaNCS for Insurance technology solution onto Oracle Cloud Infrastructure technology.
Benefits
By creating a digital and cloud-based transformation, MLC Life Insurance has realized a truly modern and technologically advanced architecture that streamlines interactions and improves the experience for both customers and enterprise users.
This initiative resulted in the migration of approximately two million insurance policies from legacy systems to TCS BaNCS for Insurance.
In partnership with TCS, MLC Life Insurance was able to consolidate 640 legacy products across three lines of business (Group, Retail Advised, and Bancassurance and Direct), which were mapped to 53 TCS BaNCS for Insurance products.
As a result of system consolidation, MLC Life Insurance’s group and retail businesses can now operate side by side within the same technology delivery, as do the open and closed-book businesses.
The new digital ecosystem makes the development and launch of new products easier and faster. It already has helped the life insurer grow by enabling it to develop and launch new variants of its Income Protection products, in addition to revamping its retail on-sale products with new advantages.
Furthermore, MLC Life Insurance’s adoption of a TCS BaNCS for Insurance digital front-end for its operations team has resulted in significant improvement in processing times for some business processes and a greater level of satisfaction among customers and advisers.
Other benefits have been realized by MLC Life Insurance since implementing the TCS BaNCS for Insurance, including but not limited to:
- A total of 3,000+ manual spreadsheets for group member data have been migrated and replaced with automated processing using TCS BaNCS for Insurance.
- The MLC Life Insurance ecosystem is integrated with 18 interfacing systems (internal and external), resulting in 200+ integration points.
- Support is provided to more than 62,000 advisers and licensees.
- More than 50 million correspondence items (e.g., policy documents and letters) are being managed.
- A digital operating model for MLC Life Insurance’s internal users has been created.
The resulting system – deployed and live since December 2023 – boasts a future-ready, cloud-first system hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It is both flexible and powerful enough to supercharge MLC Life Insurance’s growth as it strengthens its position in the Australian insurance/superannuation market.
The teamwork between the TCS and MLCL technology teams in the planning phase, and especially in the lead up to the migration weekend, resulted in one of the most seamless cloud migrations of a core platform both we and our various partners had seen. Our business went home on a Friday having worked on the system hosted in a data center and returned on the Monday to work on that same system now hosted in the cloud; other than performance improvements it was invisible. Which is exactly what we would want for our business – as any customer or advisor impact would have been a fail.
*Per MLC Life Insurance (transitioning to Acenda): “In 2016 MLC Life Insurance became an independent life insurer with the strong support of Nippon Life, a global leader in the life insurance industry.
In December 2024, Nippon Life announced it is substantially increasing their commitment in the Australian life insurance market and supporting our continued growth by merging with another long-standing provider in our industry, Resolution Life Australasia. Together, we will be known as Acenda, creating one of Australia’s largest life insurance entities.”
