Thought Leadership in Action

Big Plans with New Partners

A large AM Best A-rated Life & Annuity carrier with over 700,000 customers needed to support aggressive business expansion into the Bank and Independent Broker-Dealer channels. Business within these channels is transacted via electronic STP (straight-through processing) submissions through the DTCC, and the Carrier needed to rapidly adopt this workflow to participate.

One Chance to Make a First Impression

To give its channel partners confidence to transact business, the Carrier needed to quickly stand up a reliable DTCC integration that was scalable from a cost, functionality, and support standpoint. The Carrier considered building this in-house but quickly realized that given the aggressive timeframes and the reliability required of the integration, it needed to find an industry-recognized partner with a verifiable STP implementation track record – from overall solution design to breadth of business & IT capabilities. Finally, the Carrier also had several customizations it needed to include into the scope while maintaining an aggressive rollout plan. Ebix Consulting was a natural choice given its long history of delivering solutions and services to the Life & Annuity community, including robust STP workflows.

Working Smarter

The Ebix Consulting team listened carefully to the Client’s needs and objectives and then proposed a solution that leveraged Ebix Consulting’s existing DTCC solution model components. The plan included the build-out of custom features to extend integration to the Carrier’s administrative and reporting systems. The foundation was built upon several core Ebix Consulting integration components and allowed transactions in ACORD-standard file format to arrive at the Client’s administration system via web service delivery. A component service was incorporated to process the DTCC Attachments message in real-time. The end solution included Application-to-Attachments document matching and workflow controls around the process flow, making the integration inherently fault tolerance. Overall, the solution included Positions, Commissions, Financial Activity Reporting, and DTCC Attachments Messaging.

Outcomes

Within the first quarter of production, the Client began receiving accolades from distributor partners in the new channels, including one that gave a 7-out-of-7 score for linking DTCC positions. In under twelve months, the Carrier client was live with straight-through processing – from order entry to settlement – with distributors in the new business channels.

From design, development, testing, and support, Ebix Consulting accelerated the delivery of a working business solution. By leveraging a proprietary DTCC Integration base pattern, Ebix Consulting rapidly delivered an industry-proven solution that included practical client customizations.

Not only is the solution robust and reliable, but it is business scalable and responsive – onboarding a new distributor is quick and only a matter of configuration, and any number of distributors can be supported, each with unique reporting schedules.