How will life and pensions firms modernize their operations and the customer experience in a rapidly evolving landscape?
This question was at the heart of SS&C's recent Life and Pensions Briefing. Major shifts in the life and pensions landscape—and the strategic choices firms must make now to remain competitive—were brought to the table.
We gathered more than 20 senior providers and consultants in life assurance, pensions, insurance and wealth for an open discussion of market trends and headwinds. Industry experts shared perspectives on their pain points and how they intend to navigate the industry’s accelerating changes. We also shared practical lessons from recent transformation and lift-out projects, including one in which SS&C applied its own AI technology to a real-world client engagement.
MULTI-LAYERED HEADWINDS
Spencer Baum, Head of SS&C UK & Europe, SS&C GIDS, highlighted common threads we have been hearing from our life and pensions clients, such as intensifying cost pressures, strains on operating models and the persistent tension between customer personalization and operational scale. Providers are struggling to keep pace with technology investment while staying ahead of changing compliance requirements and ensuring data security and data privacy.
Several residual factors are also blocking success for life and pensions companies. Firms carry large, often fragmented books, lack service standardization, work with disconnected data and have limited product support. Keeping pace with regulatory pressures and evolving market trends while maintaining quality of the investor, policyholder or member experience is a substantial undertaking.
"The industry is seeing retail-level customer expectations. If you can buy something on Amazon and get it delivered the same day, why must you wait ten days for a pension projection or a form to be sent to you to fill out and return?" — Keith Aylwin, Senior Partner, Alpha FMC
Keith Aylwin told the panel that transformation activity is at its busiest in 30 years, with sweeping changes across operations, call centers, marketing and distribution. This activity stems from the same key forces that were relevant 20 years ago, including customers, distribution, cost, regulation and technology. But there has been a notable shift. Technology is now the primary driver of transformation.
AI: TAMING FRAGMENTED DATA
AI dominated the group's discussion across three key areas:
Central to all three was the challenge of fragmented data. Customer, policy and operational data scattered across multiple formats, systems and business units create compounding problems downstream. In the past, fixing the system of record was once the biggest hurdle, but this is no longer the case as making improvements to data quality and the customer experience are far more complex and complicated to execute than technological updates. The group debated whether AI can be deployed to rectify poor data, or whether firms must resolve data quality issues before bringing AI into the organization. Matt Temple, Managing Director EMEA, SS&C GIDS, argued that even incremental AI adoption can make a meaningful difference, particularly where AI can impose structure on legacy systems and data.
"With AI, make sure you get the data engineered correctly first. Get that foundation right by using partners to get the most out of your data." — Matt Temple, Managing Director EMEA, SS&C GIDS
SS&C offers several near-term solutions to help firms introduce AI, including document extraction, reconciliation and compliance. We currently engage more than 1,200 digital workers via our automation platform and have proven accuracy across several life and pensions use cases.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
We invest heavily in our growing life, pensions and insurance business, which currently has $472 billion in global assets under management, 6.3 million plans under administration and nearly 90 life and pensions clients globally.
We also host regular retirement and pensions briefings with executives and decision-makers in the life and pensions industry and encourage you to join us to share and gain valuable market insights.
To learn more about SS&C’s capabilities, contact us.
About SS&C Life and Pensions:
SS&C provides a full set of solutions for the life and pensions sector, with market-leading, end-to-end administration and technology solutions that help insurers and pension providers unlock efficiencies, modernize their operations and enhance the customer experience.
Our core SS&C Life and Pensions capabilities:
Through our proprietary platforms, scalable service models and proven transformation expertise, we enable firms to consolidate, automate and grow—across open and closed books—while meeting the highest standards of governance, compliance and customer care.