Teachers Provident Society faced a common, but nonetheless formidable, set of challenges.
Firstly, they needed to resolve specific problems with their existing systems: lack of a single consistent view of their relationship with a given customer; and the impending cessation of support for their unit trust system.
Secondly, they had to address longer term issues affecting the industry as a whole: reduced margins, stiffer competition and an ever increasing pace of change.
This was the backdrop to their initial implementation of eXii.
Teachers started by using eXii Customer Manager to support a more customer focussed service. Customer advisors now had a complete picture of their contact with a customer and a consolidated view of their products.
The next step was to replace their existing unit trust system with eXii Unitised Collective Investments and Payments Manager, but this went beyond simply replicating the functionality of the old system. eXii also supported new initiatives such as loyalty bonuses and tapered charging.
With their immediate problems resolved, Teachers looked to exploit the flexibility of eXii to release new products. The programme to launch a new stakeholder pension took just 6 weeks and was achieved by simply reconfiguring the existing eXii components.
In accordance with their strategy and buoyed by their success to date, Teachers decided to move their conventional life assurance business to eXii to gain the same improvements in customer service and reduced costs as they had with their unit trusts.
Teachers is now selling products over the internet and allowing customers to view and administer their own policies. Thus, customers are provided with the level of service and the choice of channels that they expect and, because it is all handled by eXii, administration costs are further reduced.
More recently Teachers has moved into third party product administration and once again eXii has risen to meet the new challenge, providing multiple environments with an appropriate level of segregation.
eXii is now central to all Teachers’ activities, supporting multiple products from multiple suppliers and providing the comprehensive set of services that customers expect. But Teachers chose not to do everything in one step. In fact, many of the needs that eXii has met weren’t even envisaged at the outset.
eXii has adapted and grown over time to meet the ever changing demands of the business. It has been deployed in many stages, each building on the success of the last. Finally IT has become a source of competitive advantage for Teachers rather than an obstacle to change.