The Technology You Buy Today Will Still Be With You Tomorrow
EDS SOLCORP WealthServ – Technology That Grows With You
Professionals throughout the distribution channel for insurance and wealth management products and services, face daily challenges in operating, planning and growing their businesses. Effective technology is crucial to meeting those challenges, but buying technology for its own sake wastes money and puts businesses at risk.
Too often, businesses invest in software that solves an immediate problem, but fails to go further to help position the company for longer-term success. A company may choose software that soothes an immediate pain point, but is not designed for multiple business lines, integration with other systems, or linking to outside information sources. EDS SOLCORP believes that technology should grow and develop along with clients' businesses.
Founded in 1980, EDS SOLCORP is a global leader in software solutions and consulting services for the life insurance and wealth management industries. Over the past 25 years EDS SOLCORP's product design, development, and implementation teams have accumulated unparalleled life insurance domain expertise and knowledge.
Keeping a focus on the insurance and wealth management industries, EDS SOLCORP continues to evolve by offering solutions that cover the end-to-end needs of both distributors and manufacturers in the industry. One primary example of this is the WealthServ suite of business process and information management products, which fully address the constantly evolving relationship between financial product manufacturers and their distribution channels. Similarly, the ways in which vital customer and process information is delivered must also evolve in order to keep and attract new customer relationships at all levels of the supply chain.
EDS SOLCORP believes that everyone involved in the chain linking individual retail customers to the organizations that provide financial, investment and insurance products is a client. The account holder is the client of an agent, who may be a client of a brokerage, which in turn is a client of a distributor, which is a client of an insurance carrier, mutual fund provider or bank. Focusing on serving clients, WealthServ is designed to remedy and effectively manage the fragmentation of information and processes created by the diverse client chain. Ultimately, WealthServ technology provides clients with increased quality of advice, improved service and dependable accountability.
To guide the product development priorities and focus for WealthServ, EDS SOLCORP turned to its "C5 essential business priorities" vision, which directly addresses the MGA/Agent and Dealer/Advisor world. "C5" represents the business functions that must be fully addressed to provide the highest quality solutions and is the company's framework for managing product strategy and development for distribution channel offerings.
EDS SOLCORP C5 essential business priorities are:
- Client Management
- Clients are the reason businesses exist and prosper. Ensure that clients are well informed at the right time, well treated and well serviced.
- Contacts, marketing, alerts and renewals, e-mail, life event tracking, data focused for best advice.
- Consolidation
- Information is the life force of business. Ensure that everyone who needs information from multiple sources has all the accurate information they need when they need it, brought together in one place regardless of source, ready for use.
- All necessary and relevant client, agent, branch, or company data available in one view. Assets, positions, performance, statements, online, any financial source in Canada or the US.
- Connectivity
- Unhindered communication is essential to efficient business processes. Ensure there are no obstacles to the effective flow of information between and among people, organizations and technologies. Some of the most dramatic costs savings and service efficiencies lie in this capability.
- This is the essential future requirement for two-way business links between independent distributors and their multiple suppliers. Any business application should have measurable ROI, but it will have even greater leverage if it successfully connects to the rest of the industry.
- Connectivity could rapidly become a top imperative for any business software application under consideration.
- Compliance
- Regulatory standards and industry compliance practices are becoming increasingly complex. Ensure that business systems know the rules and help businesses follow them.
- Licensing, audit, traceability, SOX, AML, and Basel, E&O.
- Compensation
- Remuneration is one of the reasons people engage in business. Ensure that everyone who is due payment is paid quickly, accurately and fully and that payors meet all their obligations.
- Reconciliation, at-risk positions, net commission reporting.
- When examining any candidate software, EDS SOLCORP recommends that companies keep the "C5" priorities in mind and ensure it directly supports business drivers including:
- Strategy: Longer-term sustainable growth, new business partners
- Cost reduction: Productivity and efficiencies of people and processes today
- Risk: Compliance data accuracy now and as things change
- Revenues: New products, new markets, new commission models
The future for MGAs will be just as challenging as the present. And meeting future challenges with technology will warrant the same care as is needed today. Just as EDS SOLCORP aligns product development efforts using its C5 business priorities vision, businesses can use criteria such as ROI and the C5 priorities as checklists when considering software options to meet their needs now and in the future.
About EDS SOLCORP
EDS SOLCORP, a global business unit within EDS, is a leader in software solutions and services for the life insurance and wealth management industries. For 25 years, EDS SOLCORP solutions have helped customers reduce their total cost of administration, accelerate time-to-market for new products, and streamline their infrastructure.