Working A Little Magic for Allstate

"Allstate Life Insurance Company's use of Magic is truly impressive. With 50 developers and an army of users they manage around 1500 financial products representing nearly a million contracts exceeding 20 billion dollars in business."

John Morris, DatamotiveSystems, Inc.

Challenge

The Allstate Corporation (NYSE: ALL) is the nation's largest publicly held life insurance company providing insurance products to more than 16 million households and with approximately 12,300 exclusive agents and financial specialists in the U.S. and Canada. Allstate Financial Group includes the businesses that provide life and supplemental insurance, retirement, banking and investment products through distribution channels that include Allstate agents, independent agents, financial institutions and broker-dealers.

Allstate Insurance Company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Allstate Corporation, needed an integrated system to develop and manage annuity and life insurance products. The system needed to be capable of managing a changing set of business processes, modeling alternatives and scaling to the growth in volume and complexity of these critical business lines. Allstate selected the Transcend and Lanmark applications created in eDeveloper by Trimark. Transcend/Landmark allowed Allstate to model, create and manage annuity and life insurance products. With Trimark's subsequent acquisition by PeopleSoft and the eventual discontinuation of the business unit by PeopleSoft, Allstate needed to make certain that it had capabilities for developing, maintaining and integrating these applications.

Solution

Allstate Insurance Company acquired an earlier version of eDeveloper, the tool used to create the annuity and life insurance applications. With a team of more than 50 Magic Software programmers, they successfully integrated and enhanced a very large and diverse set of applications spanning multiple disciplines and business processes.

Benefits

When it came time to take over responsibility for maintaining and enhancing this major business application, Allstate were able to assemble a team of developers as well as train and develop new ones. The application brings immeasurable benefit to the organization: it allows for rapid agility in business processes by empowering Allstate to model and create a large number of annuity and life insurance products. Since implementation, more than 1500 such products have been created. Nearly one-million financial services contracts are tracked and managed by the system. Estimates of the financial scope of these contracts exceed $20 billion in assets. As such, it is one of the largest and most significant financial management system installations in the world.

System Architecture:

• Client OS: WinNT
• Server OS: Sun Solaris
• Database: Oracle
• Messaging: IBM WebSphere MQ