POS solution from CGI accelerates Forester Life’s sales force productivity and enhances customer service

“After our initial POS system proved to be unreliable and not able to address our full requirements, we looked at several IT services providers for an alternate solution. We chose CGI because of its skilled people and demonstrable knowledge of the financial services industry.”

Euan Allison, Managing Director, Forester Life

The Client
Forester Life is part of Foresters Marketing Group, a financial services and charitable organisation that has been operating throughout the UK, USA and Canada for more than 125 years. In the UK, Foresters offer retirement, savings and investment plans, as well as life insurance and income protection to assist members with their financial security and peace of mind.

The Challenge
As part of it’s move from a ‘branch office’ of its Canadian parent to a full UK corporate entity, Foresters management team committed to maintaining a direct sales force throughout the UK. This meant acquiring a new sales automation and Point-of-Sale (POS) system that would enable them to maintain cost-effective field operations, without having to incur the huge cost of opening branch offices across the country.

The POS system is used by Forester advisers within customers’ homes to conduct fact-finds and needs analyses, present product information and provide financial advice in addition to producing quotes and executing a product sale. Running on the adviser’s laptop, the POS system links a network of advisers in the field with sales managers working at home and the Foresters head-office administration systems.

However, Foresters existing POS system was unreliable and had a number of compatibility issues with other Foresters applications. In addition, changes in legislation required Foresters to launch a number of new products which were not adequately handled by the system, forcing them to resort to manual, paper-based processes. Further compounding the situation was the lack of Y2K compliance – leaving Forester Life only nine months to implement a new system.

The Strategy
After considering several IT service providers known to be experienced in the UK financial services sector, Forester Life turned to CGI for help. In an aggressive, nine-month development project CGI customised and enhanced it’s Financial Advisor Workbench (FAW) to meet Foresters need for a robust and reliable POS system, to be used by more than 100 Foresters advisers.

FAW required additional functionality to support savings and investments plans, which represents 60% of Foresters business. The CGI team also added a number of compliance-based capabilities to meet regulatory requirements, such as the production of Suitability Reports, summarising all the pre- and post-sale regulatory information arising from a sales transaction.

The development effort included a sophisticated workflow engine to manage the entire product purchase cycle, automatically routing information to sales managers for approvals or directly to Foresters or third party administration systems for processing.

Forester's small system development group scoped the requirements definition for the new POS system while CGI managed the development and all but the final testing.

“Our biggest challenge had to do with our own resources”, adds Allison. “Our people have regular roles to play and we couldn’t afford to have them pulled off into this POS project team. We needed a partner we could trust and rely on to do the entire job for us – and we got it with CGI.”

Because of the immediate need to support new financial products, Foresters chose a ‘big bang’ approach to roll out the new system. After a week of training for the entire team of sales representatives and financial advisers, the old system was switched off, and the new POS system based on CGI’s FAW product was switched on … and has continued to successfully support Foresters business ever since.

The Technology

• Financial Advisor Workbench (CGI)
• Report Author’s Workbench (CGI)
• Quotation Builder’s Workbench (CGI)
• Visual Basic (Microsoft)
• SQL Anywhere (Microsoft)

The Results
In spite of a difficult economy and highly competitive market, the new system is enabling Foresters to achieve all its business targets, while maintaining its direct sales force. Since the system was installed, the efficiencies and productivity improvements have enabled the sales representatives to grow Foresters business by 261%, when the number of representatives has only increased by 40%. The new system has also enabled Foresters sales representatives to increase the number of multiple-product sales by 100% and increase their average premium size by more than 30%. CGI supports and maintains the Foresters POS application ensuring the system provides consistent performance on a day-to-day basis and remains compliant in the light of regulatory changes.

In testament to CGI’s work, Foresters was awarded first place in the 2003 national Financial Adviser Sales Awards for Best Point-of-Sale Technology. Forester Life's managing director, Euan Allison said, “We were not surprised to be short-listed for the third year running, because of the systems success in enabling Foresters’ advisers to give excellent financial advice at the point-of-sale. With the help of CGI, we designed a system specifically to identify the needs of our customers, so it is tailored for ease of use by our advisers in the field, with visual displays to stimulate maximum customer interaction”.