ABSA Life has become the latest insurance company to decide to implement Exergy, SDT's insurance solution.

In addition, policyholders' claims will soon be settled faster and more smoothly than ever before, and ABSA Life will significantly cut its cost of administration.

"ABSA will now have a single platform for all aspects of its life business," says Lee Kuyper, commercial executive at SDT, a company in the JSE AltX-listed SilverBridge group. "ABSA will be able to take ownership of the solution in a way that will allow it to do future product configuration quickly and cost-effectively."

"We chose SDT's Exergy after a comprehensive market survey and a comprehensive due diligence and proof-of-concept process," says Izak Smit, MD of ABSA Life. "It was important to select a vendor who we believe has the ability to cope with the scale of our business and the complexity of integration into a big group like ABSA, yet who are easy to work with and who will get the job done. We have a successful bancassurance model, arguably the best on the continent. We believe the Exergy solution will just add to our business's value proposition. It will enable us to respond to new market opportunities even quicker."

"Exergy is one of the important components in the ABSA Life change programme," says Schoeman Rudman, consultant to ABSA Life. "As part of the project, we carefully selected systems to implement comprehensive workflow and work management, configurable (for speed) and flexible (for agility) product administration, and outcomes-based remuneration. All of the systems seamlessly integrate to create one solution, so Exergy also had to prove that it could make and receive calls from the other components."

A key feature for ABSA, says Kuyper, was the fact that Exergy is parameter-driven, which confers the flexibility for ABSA Life to do its own configuration in future.

An important aspect of the implementation of Exergy was its scalability, which ABSA Life, SDT and IBM Africa tested. Running against Microsoft SQL Server, Exergy was tested to ensure it could scale by successfully completed performance testing to around five million policies, and 1 000 concurrent users. Exergy passed the rigorous tests with flying colours, and the overall platform has shown that it can meet the most demanding of enterprise requirements, says Kuyper.

SDT and IBM ran tests which encompassed all month-end processing, some transaction processing, the capturing of new business, validation of new business, and the simulation of 1 000 concurrent users.

"Legacy platforms such as those run by ABSA are famed for their ability to scale and manage large numbers of policies and users. For Exergy to replace these legacy systems, we had to prove that we could scale to the same extent, and better, and cope with the extremes of monthly processing. Ultimately, ABSA Life was convinced that Exergy on SQL Server could not only cope with its requirements, but still had headroom for future growth."

SDT is now well entrenched in the first tier of financial services, Kuyper concludes. "With ABSA Life and two other Top 7 insurers in our client portfolio, we are by now easily the top solutions provider to the insurance market in Africa."

Exergy will provide Sanlam with a "view of the truth", better business intelligence, better reporting to reinsurers, and in future, an enhanced view of its reinsured risk portfolios. It has also been able to automate previously manual processes, which makes for smoother, standardised outcomes.

"Sanlam will now be in a position to assess the risk that needs to be reinsured more accurately. The information that needs to be given through to the reinsurers will be more easily reconcilable and available on a frequent basis," says Lee Kuyper, commercial executive at SDT, a company in the JSE-listed SilverBridge Holdings group.

"Sanlam needed to automate a number of the processes relating to the calculation and distribution of reinsurance in Sanlam. Sanlam issued an RFP, which we were able to satisfy, and we won the resultant tender and contract," he adds.

Stéfan du Preez, development actuary at Sanlam, says Sanlam is reconsidering its reinsurance business model and that a single technology platform and flexibility of design were crucial elements that Sanlam considered when awarding the contract.

"SDT's Exergy solution, and the company's overall value proposition, met all these criteria and we are pleased to have them on board," Du Preez says.

Sanlam expects to go live with Exergy towards the end of May.

The contract win is one of the most important to date for SDT, says Kuyper, as "it entrenches us in Tier 1 of the financial services market. Having negotiated terms and conditions with the group, we are now a selected vendor for further business, and we hope to enhance our presence with them, both in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa".

Exergy is an events-driven, rules-based administration solution that empowers life insurance administrators with the tools needed to achieve strategic success.