Cut Product Development Cycle Time in Half | Case Study

Company Background

The Secure 2.0 Act of 2022 is driving the need for rapid innovation in the retirement and lifetime income sector. Because of this, a leading global life insurance carrier needed to accelerate its product development cycle.

In Life Insurance, traditional product development cycles span six to nine months. With today's dynamic market and evolving legislation, carriers must shorten the development cycle to remain competitive.

Accelerate Product Development Cycle

Reduce the timeline in half, from 6-12 months to 3-4 weeks.

Maximize Profitability with Consistent Pricing

Actuaries can access the same logic with models living in a controlled, cloud-based environment. This eliminates manual spreadsheet errors and ensures consistent product pricing across any market.

Deliver Product Updates Faster

Product updates are made and shared across all relevant systems in one hour compared to the previous timeline of three months.

Challenge

The primary challenge for the carrier was to accelerate its product development cycle, especially in the context of the Secure 2.0 Act implications for retirement and lifetime income products —the technology infrastructure and development processes needed to support rapid experimentation and innovation. The reliance on Excel for critical actuarial calculations was seen as a limitation due to its perceived lack of robustness for enterprise-level tasks.

Solution

Faster development cycles fuel agile responses to market opportunities.

The carrier chose Coherent Spark to enable the conversion of complex actuarial models into API endpoints, facilitating seamless integration with middleware and partners. The implementation was swift and efficient. Within days, the carrier's team marked up the necessary Excel workbooks, and the conversion to API endpoints was completed in seconds. This rapid transformation allowed the IT team to focus on integrating these endpoints into the middleware ecosystem and addressing compliance and legal aspects of product development.

Adopting Coherent Spark reduced product development cycles by 50%, enabling the carrier to respond to market opportunities more quickly than before. The technology allowed for easy versioning of APIs, robust testing, and efficient documentation generation.

This agility is particularly beneficial in fostering strategic partnerships and fulfilling the requirements of the Secure 2.0 Act.

Product Development Cycle Cut from 12 Months to 3 Weeks