MONY settled on an administration system, purchasing from AdminServer the AdminLife&Annuity System. Rogers says the company was aware it could not go forward with four legacy systems, though. To make the economics work, we needed to get everything on one system, he says.

The idea of converting several hundred thousand policies off of old legacy platforms onto something new was daunting, notes Rogers. After purchasing the administration system, MONY went looking for conversion technology, and Universal Conversion Technologies (UCT) was what it found. [UCT] had more than 25 years of experience in the insurance industry, and it had developed a repeatable process and metrics that allow for accurate estimating, says Rogers.

The return on investment for the conversion piece of the project appeared to indicate it would afford a quick payback, adds Carol Macaluso, vice president and CFO of the annuities division for MONY Life. The cost of doing the conversion, relative to the ongoing maintenance savings, could generate a two-year payback, she says.

The first step in the process was to get the new administration system up and running. Its a rules-based engine, says Rogers. The good news is its extremely flexible, and you can define the rules to be pretty much anything you want. The bad news is you are building a lot of the base functionality from the ground up.
After the new system was set up, MONY began converting its first productflexible premium variable annuityto AdminServer using the UCT tools, including Data Conversion Engineer, Data Con-version Architect, and Data Analysis & Reporting Tool. It went extremely well with relatively few problems, says Rogers. At the end of the day, we had a new system that was highly flexible, allowed us to get products to the market much faster, and allowed us to serve our customers better.

One conversion is complete, Macaluso says, and the second conversion currently is under way. This is the big one for MONY, as it involves roughly half of the companys block of annuities.
From the IT perspective, the reduction in maintenance costs is an important aspect of the deal, but there are other benefits, as well. The complexity of the environment also is reduced, says Rogers. We are going to have all the policy data in one place. In addition, the company was able to take what Rogers called a clean sheet of paper approach toward process reengineering. We could look at the ideal way of doing this work, he says. One example was that one of our business processes used to be a manual effort that took more than 60 steps to complete. We put that functionality into the new system, and its now a two-step process.

Macaluso is pleased the division was able to develop a new product it would not have been able to produce in the past. What has been a plus for the actuaries is theyre not constrained in their product design by systems constraints, she says. We are able to realize the benefit of the product design flexibility immediately. The big benefit in the back office is the encoding of the business rules that were in peoples heads, in documents, or in manuals, and we put them into the system and let the system do the checking and reviewing. Such freedom can be intoxicating, according to Macaluso. The biggest challenge we faced was the cultural change associated with a more flexible target system in terms of controlling our own destiny, she says. People were used to being controlled, so to speak, by systems constraints. ROBERT REGIS HYLE

THE PROBLEM
Carrier needed to get all its data from three legacy systems into one system.

THE COMPANY
The MONY Group
Assets Under Management: $55 billion

THE SOLUTION
Data Conversion Engineer, Data Conversion Architect, and Data Analysis & Reporting Tool from Universal Conversion Technologies
Web Site: www.uctcorp.com