Karen Wentzel, Head of Annuities at Sanlam Corporate and Victor Willemse Actuarial Analyst at Sanlam Employee Benefits, talk to us about Sanlam’s E-nnuity product and their partnership with JumpCO.
Tony: As I understand it, the Sanlam E-nnuity platform now allows Sanlam Pension fund members the ability to receive immediate real-time quotations on annuities from their financial advisors from an online quotation programme, E-nnuity. E-nnuity enables financial advisors to give pension fund members, who are about to retire, multiple instant quotations based on real-time values from across the range of Sanlam Corporate’s annuity products. From a technology perspective, you used IBM WebSphere and DBQ as the runtime of the database with JumpCO as external consultant.
How long has E-nnuity been in use by Sanlam Corporate customers?
Karen: Yes, since July 2007 the JumpCO team has been instrumental in developing E-nnuity, which is a web-based annuity quotation system.
Daily we update it with market rates and indices, with system developed to integrate fully with the existing standalone Sanlam architecture and infrastructure. Now, the quotation system was originally just developed for our staff as a tool for pricing. But over the last 10 years, it was expanded to make it a very useful tool for brokers in doing their financial planning and to also provide quotations on various annuity products for a range of clients.
Tony: It is quite a broad product so Victor, could you tell us about the feature updates that you have done to the E-nnuity over its lifetime and how many have you done in the last while. Is this a continuous process?
Victor: Over the last four years, we had various updates, some being minor, and then also other major developments. Minor developments would be typically things like cosmetic changes, and then the major developments would be something like implementing a new product on the system. So, I want to summarise the updates and improvements as product updates, technical pricing changes, cosmetic changes to the look and feel, and then new operational features and technology updates.
In conjunction with these, we also had to keep track and stay aligned to changes in legislation such as the recent POPIA legislation.
The main areas of development are as follows:
Product updates: In the last 10 years Sanlam added the complete picture pension and more recently, the Sanlam with-profit annuity, both of which use stochastic calculations to determine the annuity price, which required our annuity calculator to be updated to cater for this.
So, obviously, we expect the Sanlam With-profit Annuity to take off now that it’s implemented on E-nnuity and available to the market.
Technical pricing changes: Allowances were made for changes like daily indices and market rates, flexible mortality basis and customer input, such as specific-dated yield curves for staff users, as well as many other logistical changes to improve the user experience.
It is fully functional for brokers, which have a certain access, and staff have a certain access, which allow them a bit more flexibility.
Cosmetic changes to the look and feel: We’ve added a few explanatory labels on some pages just to ensure the user understands exactly what the functionality means. In other areas, we’ve replaced some controls with drop down lists, which makes selection and validation of inputs easier. It also allows you to group controls better, which in turn results in a cleaner and easier page to read for a much more simplified view to the user.
So, under the new operational features that we’ve added, we are currently busy implementing a new workflow that is facilitated by a Business Process Manager that was designed by business in conjunction with JumpCO. A Business Process Manager ensures that an automated policy is generated and issued to the pensioner after the quotation for the life annuity has been accepted, saving some of my colleagues many hours of work. This automated policy generation process also integrates several systems, architectural environments in Sanlam I.T. The Integration for this was made possible by the collaboration of JumpCO and Sanlam developers. Previously, the policy generation was a manual process, so it took a lot of hours to issue a policy after the quote was accepted. But with this Business Process Manager, we are making it an automated process. So, it’s very easier, quick and much more secure.
Technology updates: The user interface, or front end, is a web application and the user inputs information on a webpage that communicates with a calculator through a very precise parameter mapping. In early 2017, my involvement with E-nnuity took off and I took ownership of all the actuarial and technical calculations. Then JumpCO appointed a new and very experienced developer to the development team, specifically to code the calculator in Java. Before, the calculator was written in VB.NET, and not in the businesses control. To our amazement, in a very short time, the new developer got to grips with the workings of our products and he also made some very insightful suggestions. This understanding facilitated the quick implementation of several improvements to the system. So, in 2017 we decided to redesign the calculator or back end.
Tony: This has been running since 2017. From your perspective, Karen, have you seen the value of the E-nnuity to Sanlam corporate increase over this time?
Karen: Developing and expanding E-nnuity was a joint effort between Sanlam and JumpCO. The JumpCO developers had to upskill on the technical aspects of specifically annuity pricing and all the factors to be considered. We really valued the full support from JumpCO. And the collaboration with the Sanlam developers. As Victor mentioned, a lot of the features and updates happened over time. Now, technology is not an event, it’s part of everyday learning. So as the demands of the brokers and the industry change, Sanlam also had to work continuously to keep up to date and keep our technology at the cutting edge of the market requirements.
Not only did the use of E-nnuity change, but it also added new products and benefits to keep us relevant. I must say, the seamless implementation of the new business flows, and the communication with external brokers have really been a great success and make business easier for all of us.
Tony: Victor, are there any specific feature requests that have added significant value, especially in the backdrop of effort versus benefit, done in a timeframe that worked for you and that exceeded your expectations?
Victor: So, when we redesigned the calculator, we set aside about six months for this project. The entire process, from planning with JumpCO, to implementation, took just over three months, saving us a lot of time. The time saved allowed us to do many updates much earlier than expected, in addition to implementing new features. Over the last three years, our new business flows have increased significantly, which we believe is a result of brokers finding it advantageous to do the quotations on our user friendly system that can communicate with businesses and uses current marketer rates.
Tony: The current drive with technology and probably with any system is the user experience. People don’t want to struggle anymore with using interfaces. It seems like you have found the sweet spot in terms of the system usability.
For a change, it is great for me to not just find out about the actual product, but also a bit about what happens behind the scenes, the development and the systems that drive and how you collaborate with JumpCO and IBM Systems.