COUNTRY Financial

Applying a best-of-breed approach to technology replacement, COUNTRY Financial selected CGI Ratabase^® as the cornerstone of their product development platform.

Country Financial serves about 1 million households and businesses throughout the United States.  It offers customers a full range of financial products and services from auto, home and life insurance to retirement planning services, investment management and annuities.

The challenge

In 2011, COUNTRY realized that their growth targets for introducing new products into new markets could not be supported by their current system infrastructure. Dated technology, hard-coded systems, and a lack of resources to support these solutions led COUNTRY to search for new core solutions and set their future technical direction.  COUNTRY conducted several rigorous vendor selection activities followed by in-depth, proof-of-concept projects before deciding on their new technology platform.

The solution

Following the proof-of-concept work, COUNTRY licensed three components of CGI's Insurance Fusion360 offering, including: CGI Ratabase for their rating and pricing logic, Adaptik's PolicyWriter and MajescoMastek's STG Billing. With plans to roll out CGI Ratabase to multiple parts of their business, COUNTRY began working directly with COUNTRY Actuaries and product specialists to build out their rating logic, beginning with Personal Auto. Over the course of the project, CGI and COUNTRY worked collaboratively to build requirements for 18 states. In addition to Personal Auto, COUNTRY plans to use CGI Ratabase for their other lines of business across the company. 

Through the course of the project, CGI worked closely with COUNTRY resources on knowledge transfer activities to ensure that the resources would be self-sufficient following the initial project. The additional roll-out will be led by COUNTRY.

As part of the overall implementation, COUNTRY benefited from CGI Ratabase's pre-integration with PolicyWriter, the Policy Administration solution they are also implementing.  The combination of these two highly configurable solutions gives COUNTRY complete control over their business processes.

The results

Following the initial CGI engagement, COUNTRY is on track to keep up with their market demands to roll out new products and enter new states. They now have a flexible tool that should significantly reduce the timeline required to make product changes. By having systems that are now configurable by business users, COUNTRY resources will work collaboratively with IT to implement product updates in a matter of days compared to the weeks or months that their previous systems required.  In addition, they have the ability to test new programs and approaches for their rating and product pricing before making the decision to implement. As a direct result of CGI Ratabase and the creativity of the COUNTRY team, the company's goal is to fundamentally change how it does business.

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