Success Stories

Regulatory Compliance for Leading Insurance Firm

The Client

A leading US-based insurance company offering insurance products, investment products and advisory services that address customer needs for financial security and protection, capital accumulation, asset distribution and estate preservation. This company and its affiliates have a huge customer base of policy owners and clients for financial advisory services.

Business Need

The Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted substantial changes to the record making and record keeping rules applicable to broker-dealers . These changes affected the client's sales and servicing processes across all variable life contracts, variable annuity contracts and investment accounts. These new requirements affected the collection of information, manual work procedures and records retention, impacting 10+ departments and 15+ systems.

The client wanted UML consultants to help them determine appropriate, reasonable and feasible solutions to address the amended requirements for each of the impacted departments, including the program management of the initiative as well as implementation of the identified solutions. Where possible, UML was asked to draw synergies among the impacted departments in order to provide a cohesive view of IT to the Field sales force and to customers in relation to broker/dealer and securities business.

Challenges and Requirements

  • The client had no consistent, methodical process of managing complex cross-departmental projects (10+ departments involved; complex systems changes affecting over 15+ systems)
  • The client had many archaic systems that were not designed to capture, retain and disseminate the information required by the SEC
  • The project team only had six months in which to complete the project, from approach development to regulation compliance deadline

Our Role

  • UML worked with the client to manage the implementation from start to finish and delivered an on-time, under budget solution
  • UML consultants developed the project approach, PMO and executed the implementation which required extensive system changes
  • UML consultants established a process driven PMO structure and implemented program management processes across the following areas:

    • Consolidated Status Reporting across 10+ teams
    • Issue management/resolution
    • Risk Management
    • Defect tracking
    • Change Management Process for managing business/systems requirements changes
    • UML further defined:
    • Role and responsibilities of all team personnel
    • Framework for stakeholder management
    • Document management for all project deliverables

Benefits

  • The client became compliant with SEC regulations for variable and investment products
  • Reduced cost of manually handling regulation process
  • Improved visibility and management of key undertakings related to the SEC regulations
  • Improved effectiveness and cost containment across the undertaking
  • The project led to the development of a project governance mechanism that can now be employed in future large scale projects

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