By Vanessa Jaeger, Partner at BearingPoint, and Martin Nokes, Head of Business Development at Consor
Sales partners, such as brokers or associations, are an important sales channel for insurers in the corporate client business. They often work with framework agreements: The corresponding basic product of the insurer is tailored to the needs of the respective sales partner and, for example, special benefits, different conditions or special clauses are agreed between the insurer and the sales partner. If a business transaction (e.g. an offer or a contract) is created for a policyholder that was brokered via the sales partner, the underwriter can decide whether to base it on the basic product or on the agreed framework contract.
Challenges
Many underwriting and policy management systems offer insufficient support for master policies, if such functionality is available at all and does not require the use of word processing systems. As framework contracts differ from the basic product, they usually have to be set up as separate products. This causes corresponding IT expenditure (development), not least in the maintenance of the agreements. This can also lead to undesirable delays in the “activation” of a new sales partner because the agreement still has to be implemented from a technical perspective.
Advantages with Consor Universal
Consor Universal offers integral, end-to-end support for framework agreements. The basic functionality is as follows:
- The basic product is defined through customizing – as usual.
- However, it is now also determined whether framework agreements are possible and, if so, where deviations are permitted.
- Initially, a “framework” for outline agreements is modeled, which defines the scope within which the end users are allowed to operate in the context of their business transaction processing.
- When creating a new business transaction (GeVo), end users (underwriters, partner advisors, corporate customer advisors, etc.) choose whether they want to
a) want to create a new GeVo based on the base product,
b) create a new framework contract or
c) create a GeVo based on an outline agreement.
The conditions in the offer or contract are automatically adopted from the base product or framework agreement.
Schematically, this can be depicted as follows:
Figure 1: The user has the choice between an individual policy and a framework contract
This allows end users to independently create not only individual policies, but also new framework contracts – without the need for product modelers or even programmers to intervene. The framework contracts are then automatically available to all authorized users.
Figure 2: Deviating maximum sums insured in a framework contract
It should be emphasized that this principle works across the entire life cycle, i.e. from offers to contracts to contract amendments.
If we have aroused your interest and you would like to know more about this new function and its technical design options, we will be happy to provide you with a detailed demo.
