Web Site: www.csc.com

Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) introduced a new version of its CyberLife system for real-time administration of traditional and nontraditional life insurance and annuity contracts. CyberLife has an open architecture and Web capabilities, which can help life insurers decrease time to market for their insurance products and lower their software costs.

The enhanced CyberLife system is the result of a two-year strategic technology program (STP), which entailed more than 100 person-years from CSC and 13 leading U.S. life insurers that sponsored the program. Among those sponsors was Jackson National Life. Mark Clark, vice president, systems and programming, at Jackson, believes one of the important initiatives from the CyberLife project was to allow insurers to keep their online functions open while still doing traditional batch processing overnight. “There were several initiatives with the product,” says Clark. “One was called 24×7, which will allow us to process business around the clock as opposed to having to shut down our online systems for a nightly cycle. The problem began when we started offering customer service over the Web. People typically would sign on at night when you had your online system down. You really need to be able to keep those up 24 hours a day now. This piece allows you to do that.”

George Napoles, executive vice president of information technology at Jackson, sees the new CyberLife release as a tremendous improvement. “On the rare occasion when you might have a problem with your batch cycle and you come up late on your month-ends or year-ends, or where your batch cycle runs long and it might impact your online window, all those problems go away because you're up 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, regardless of when you run your cycles,” he says.

Another part of the project was to introduce Web-based front ends to CyberLife to allow users to process for their clients across the Web and also to do in-house processing, Clark says. “Most of CyberLife's customers still use the old 3270 green-screen technology,” he points out. “We have GUI technology. Today, you want to do all your screens on the browser so you can work remotely or allow your clients to do the transactions. By participating in this design, we had input into how the screens looked, how the transactions worked, and what transactions were supported. We made sure CSC understood what our requirements were.”

CyberLife provides straight-through processing for life and annuity products from the new-business and underwriting stages through benefits illustration, claims processing, administration, billing and collection, correspondence, and reporting. The new version complies with CSC e4, the company's enterprise integration architecture. This helps financial services companies renovate core systems, reducing the need for full-scale systems-replacement projects, and employ new software components. The new CSC e4-compliant version of CyberLife is component based and uses open standards, such as ACORD's XML interfaces and HTTP-based protocols. CyberLife's XML input and output capability and Web-based architecture simplify the management of life insurance transactions among all major parties, both inside and outside the enterprise, according to CSC.

“Jackson National has a history of collaborating on CSC's strategic technology programs,” says Napoles. “By allowing all the insurance companies to participate, we look at the systems from a slightly different perspective than CSC because we're actually out here using the system. It ensures the platform and infrastructure coincide with ours.”

Among the other CyberLife STP sponsors are AEGON USA Inc., American United Life Insurance Company, Federated Life Insurance Company, Guardian Life In-surance Company of America, Kansas City Life Insurance Company, Nationwide Life Insurance Company, New York Life In-surance Company, and United Farm Family Life Insurance Company.