I recently spent a week in Chicago. What a delight to be back in that beautiful city! I never pass up the opportunity to walk around Chicago, and as I did, I saw a shiny copper penny on the ground. It called to mind that it costs more to produce a penny than the $.01 value it represents in U.S. currency. Having been born and raised in Illinois, I also had heard that one reason the federal government won’t stop producing them is because the penny remains an homage to Abraham Lincoln, and therefore, Illinois is keen to keep it in production. But that sentiment comes at a heavy cost.
Opportunity cost
It made me think of the opportunity cost of nurturing along a legacy insurance system that’s doing ok but everyone knows is not cutting the mustard, which is to say that it’s not reaching much less surpassing the desired standard of performance. As the pandemic made abundantly clear, the Great Resignation is shining a very bright light on employee benefits and how technology can offer solutions. But let’s think about this: How can a system built 30+ years ago and that has had various incongruous additions over the years really be effective in today’s SaaS and cloud-based world? What comes to mind for me is a Johnny Cash song, “One Piece at a Time,” that speaks of a man working in a Cadillac factory and taking bits and pieces over many years to cobble together his dream car.
Incremental transformation
Let’s keep with this theme. So, you built a legacy system of disparate systems. Perhaps it’s served its purpose for a while, but now it requires a bit more TLC to run, and it performs less effectively than needed. It’s time to upgrade, but the move to a completely new core system is too much to take on at once. No problem. What if you reverse-engineered your “one piece at a time” legacy system to work toward a fully functional core admin system?
- What if you could replace your claims function first? Claims is, after all, the central and most important customer touch point in the entire system. Layer on the machine learning capabilities that mitigate fraud and loss prevention.
- Then you consider a new business and underwriting process that enables you to move from spreadsheets to help you rate, quote, and underwrite with speed and efficiency.
- Next up? Policy administration to ensure that your business has centralized policy administration, integrated claims and leave management, complex billing, and revenue management capabilities, as well as digital enablement and analytics.
Open up to possibilities
Incremental transformation opens a whole new world of possibilities for employee benefits carriers. With FINEOS AdminSuite, you can start your journey toward the future today. Placing the future of your business on a “one piece at a time” legacy system is just another example of the sunk cost fallacy we can all fall prey to. Inherently, it exposes you to risk instead of opportunity.
Investment today in this modern, core administration solution is the critical first step of your incremental transformation — a journey toward the future you can bring about at the pace you choose. With FINEOS, you are plotting a course toward complete digital transformation.
