Revolutionizing the Employee Benefits Industry

FINEOS is a Business Reporter client.

Amid today’s accelerated digital transformation trend, too many insurance companies continue to use old-fashioned IT systems. In the past, these firms built their own back-end systems to enroll customers and process claims. They expected them to last decades—and they did. As a result, many insurance companies are still using outdated legacy systems that, as well as being inefficient and expensive to run, also fail to adequately address cybersecurity and ensure the private transmission of information in the cloud. 

Today, FINEOS AdminSuite is a proven solution for the employee and group benefits segment of life, accident and health insurance, backed by the New York Life Group Benefit Solutions case study that explores how the insurer successfully replaced six legacy systems. 

A new way of working

FINEOS has a 30-year history providing software to life, accident and health insurers, operating invisibly so that insurers, employers and customers can communicate seamlessly on their insurance journeys. FINEOS saw the need to develop a new way of working to solve the issue of outdated legacy systems. So did insurer New York Life Group Benefit Solutions, which provides $4.1 billion of life, accident and disability insurance to employers, with approximately 9 million employees benefiting from these protections. 

The two companies collaborated to develop the group and employee benefits industry’s first purpose-built core system, FINEOS AdminSuite. Designed using industry best practices, the fully cloud-based system supports the insurance journey from quote to claim with components that address absences, billing, claims, payments, policies, providers, quotes, rates and underwriting. FINEOS AdminSuite offers something previously unavailable to the industry: a proven data-driven core administration system that provides end-to-end support for administrative processes and customer service. 

Meeting user needs

It’s clear that there is a real need for this new insurance approach. The employee benefits industry is a complex ecosystem: there are insurers, brokers, benefits administrators, HR teams and, of course, individual employees. All have differing requirements and resources that need to be managed. 

Insurer NYL GBS was looking to drive business efficiencies throughout the client and customer life cycle, and it needed a full end-to-end administration suite that had robust policy administration at its core and addressed both voluntary and group employee benefits. It also required a unified service that could link disability and absence management to support the insurer’s strategic vision of providing an enhanced, streamlined and customized customer experience. And it was looking for a holistic way to introduce new products, such as paid family medical leave, to employers and their employees. 

With these goals in mind, FINEOS conceived of a complete suite—a single core administration solution. The result is a highly integrated system that provides a crucial benefit to all users: a single source of truth. By connecting data from multiple sources, products (such as life, accident and disability coverage) and processes (such as purchasing, renewal and claims), users can find all the information they want in one place, simply and quickly. 

The FINEOS Platform is the only purpose-built, end-to-end SaaS insurance solution for the life, accident and health market. It comprises FINEOS AdminSuite, FINEOS Engage and FINEOS Insight. 

FINEOS AdminSuite supports the insurance journey from quote to claim and all its components are configurable to operate independently or as part of a suite. The machine learning-enabled FINEOS Engage solution enables robust, people-first digital engagement pathways, and the FINEOS Insight solution provides machine-learning models, predictive analytics and reporting across a business.

The power of SaaS

The FINEOS Platform provides a complete end-to-end solution to the employee benefits industry. Because it is software as a service (SaaS), it provides many benefits that a bespoke system does not. 

Costs are reduced because the investment in development is shared by all platform customers, and operating costs are lower because system experts manage the software and provide regular upgrades, leaving insurance companies to manage their core business. Data security is supported through enhanced functionality such as multifactor authentication, full data encryption, both in process and at rest, and single sign-on. The FINEOS Platform is compliant with security and privacy regulatory requirements including HIPAA and GDPR, and is cloud-based, which means lower setup costs, reduced downtime and the ability to access it from anywhere in the world, 24/7.

SaaS best positions insurance companies to leverage technology to drive improvements in their services. With all critical information available in one place, queries can be handled quickly and accurately. This results in fewer inquiries and less time spent chasing information. 

Benefits for insurance carriers

FINEOS AdminSuite provides insurance companies with centralized policy administration, integrated claims and leave management and the capability to manage complex billing and revenue requirements. This provides many important benefits, including a considerable lift in productivity; less time is spent on administration and, with the reduction in manual work, unnecessary problems such as data transcription errors are avoided. The insurance employee user experience is improved, with frictionless access to end-customer information. 

In addition, IT costs are reduced. In the FINEOS case study, six legacy systems were retired, eliminating the associated licensing and maintenance costs—a very significant savings. 

Importantly, FINEOS AdminSuite also enables insurance companies to provide better customer service, with more accurate query resolution and faster implementation of policy requests. Insurance customers are given greater flexibility and can configure benefits administration services to match the business processes of their finance and HR benefit teams, and can more easily adapt to employee demands and meet changing regulatory requirements. 

The end consumer—the employee—also benefits from FINEOS AdminSuite. Insurance processes are centered around them, rather than their employer, and automation speeds up the routine processes they must step through. The improved end-user experience includes the ability to access customer service across all digital channels and a comprehensive, 24/7 digital self-service facility that is easy to navigate. 

Future-ready employee benefits

FINEOS has developed the employee benefits industry’s one and only purpose-built core administration suite. Embracing the latest digital technology, it enables insurers to adopt a future-ready approach that can meet the challenges of a swiftly changing industry. Its cloud-native foundation delivers the flexibility and service that consumers and businesses now require and demand. 

The suite provides end-to-end service, from quote to claim. By integrating employee and management data from across an organization, it provides a single source of truth, where all of an employee’s enrollment information can be viewed and managed in one place. 

FINEOS AdminSuite improves the customer experience for all parties on the insurance journey: the insurer, the employer and the end-user employee. 

FINEOS AdminSuite, part of the FINEOS Platform, delivers industry-leading core capabilities across the administration of employee insurance, including absence management, billing, claims, payments, policy administration, provider management and new business and underwriting. For more information, visit FINEOS.com.

This article originally appeared in Business Reporter.

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