On Tuesday, October 18th, Mike Hydanus, SVP & CAO of National Western Life Insurance Company presented the CIO Case Study, “Project Connex”, at the CIO Insurance Summit. The CIO Insurance Summit brought together CIOs and IT executives to network and attend interactive agenda sessions The case study presentation outlined National Western’s broad systems replacement project, including new business, policy administration, sales illustrations, Web portal, and license and commissions. In addition, Hydanus discussed the process for getting internal buy-in, his non-traditional approach to the project, as well as the challenges and successes that had occurred along the way.
NWL Connex is a comprehensive upgrade project of the Company’s information technology and administrative systems to prepare for their business future. It is comprised of five separate initiatives aimed at increasing sales growth opportunities, improve new business placement rates, improve customer service, enhance financial controls and compliance capabilities and improve productivity. Rather than purchasing an existing vendor package, National Western partnered with FAST to achieve a truly services oriented architecture.
FAST is a privately-held company founded by the former leaders of NaviSys. The Company’s team of passionate, experienced entrepreneurs focuses on solving the challenges clients face as they seek to modernize their systems environments or completely replace legacy systems. Over a two year period, FAST built functionality to replace every major system for life and annuity processing. The system is currently in testing and scheduled to go live in January 2012. The result of their investment is a completely modern system. By investing in a services oriented architecture, NWL has added modular components to get the functionality they are looking for and created a system that integrates with other technologies.