Retraites Populaires has successfully adopted the new individual life insurance offers application developed by ELCA

Retraites Populaires, a Swiss company specializing in life insurance and pension planning for over a hundred years, has reaffirmed its confidence in ELCA, entrusting it with the development of a new application that will allow its sales team and external partners to manage individual life insurance offers.

Backed by its in-depth knowledge of the insurance company's IT environment, ELCA was in charge of replacing the old application, most notably restricted by the following factors: local installation, deployment problems, having to recourse to manual corrections when adjusting premiums, retyping of offers into the management application, decentralized modifications of life insurance rates and products, etc. A plethora of obstacles that ELCA made sure to overcome in its implementation of a rich Internet application (RIA).

Equally accessible for brokers (extranet) as for consultants (intranet), this solution allows the user to calculate and manage individual life insurance offers, and to generate related documents. Offers can be shared between users (external brokers, internal sales force and managers) who, based on their level of access, can see an overview of the entire process, from the creation of the offer to the automatic transfer into the policy management system.

The application is integrated into the existing modular platform, rendering it sustainable and compatible with all life insurance modular platforms. Firstly, premium and benefit calculations, as well as business rules, remain consistent across the various insurance offers and policies. Secondly, any changes made to life insurance products, such as the introduction of new rates, are automatically reflected in the individual life insurance offers application, which no longer needs to be changed or redeployed.

The application also includes an authentication feature based on identity federation mechanisms, allowing for single sign-on (SSO), without IT having to manage application-specific accounts. SSO is therefore available, not only for Retraites Populaires' nearly fifty employees, but also for some 250 consultants at Banque Cantonale Vaudoise, thanks to a partnership established with the bank. The authentication solution, backed by the secure ELCARD grid cards, was also integrated for nearly one hundred independent brokers, as well as for Retraites Populaires' consultants, who access the application remotely.

The gradual introduction of the feature, beginning in 2009, did not disrupt operations in any way, with the company enjoying record sales for the year. The application was successfully adopted both internally and externally, and nearly 400 users already have access, completing over forty offers a day.