The client:
The company is a global consulting leader in wealth and health management with annual revenues exceeding 4 billion. With early roots in Human Resource Management, the company now focuses on consulting in talent, health, retirement, and investments. Continual delivery of technology-driven solutions crafted to meet the needs of a changing workforce allows this company to assist organizations of all sizes in more than 150 countries through increasingly dynamic and complex environments.
The problem:
Pension risk consultants helping clients to develop strategies for risk management programs within changing market conditions noted a series of issues:
- lack of transparency
- price volatility
- unpredictability of global markets
- frustrations with completing transactions
Companies struggled to transfer pension liabilities to insurance providers because they could not feel confident they were executing the deal at the best time or most competitive rate.
The solution:
Company leaders conceived of an innovative solution—they wanted to build an exchange where pension risk could be bought and sold easily. This would allow companies to establish financial metrics, monitor pricing, and execute deals with confidence.
The needed technology:
This ground-breaking approach would require a new platform with both online and mobile-optimized access. As an entirely new product, it would need to be easy for customers to adopt and use. The platform would need to provide real-time and simultaneous annuity pricing across multiple countries.
What Geneca did:
This client had a long history of working with Geneca and trusted our ability to translate their ideas into a working product. In order to deliver the new technology, Geneca:
- Facilitated ideation sessions with business stakeholders to fully design an exchange platform
- Crafted a development plan utilizing agile methodology to build feature by feature with business input
- Assisted business partners to develop promotional and training materials to prepare for successful launch and adoption
- Built and delivered the software on time with all functionality
- Evolved the product to address user and customer feedback
The results are in the numbers:
This first-of-its-kind platform disrupted the industry allowing clients to quickly benefit from transparency and speed-to-market. The pension risk transfer premiums exceeded $23 billion in 2017 and are on pace to increase in 2018. This client manages about 35% of all deal volume with more than 200 global users utilizing the new exchange. The platform supports rapid execution of transactions with deal times being dramatically reduced from months or even years to just a few weeks. As a direct result of the new technology, the company is managing a higher volume of new clients generating new revenue from multi-insurer arrangements and smaller companies now able to take advantage of market opportunities.