Celent profiles 43 policy administration systems being offered in North America. This report ranks systems and identifies winners of the XCelent awards in four dimensions: Advanced Technology, Breadth of Functionality, Customer Base, and Depth of Service. To assemble the information in this report, Celent sent a detailed request for information to a broad set of policy administration system vendors.

After completing the RFIs, each eligible vendor provided a briefing and demo for Celent concentrating on usability and functionality for everyday users, as well as configurability for IT and system administration users. Celent also asked the references provided by each vendor to complete a survey and/or to be interviewed to obtain their view of the system’s business and technology value.

The RFIs, reference surveys, and interviews provided quantitative and qualitative data, much of which is included in this report.

“Significant innovation is occurring in product management and underwriting in the North American region. Carriers are looking to grow, differentiate themselves, navigate the regulatory environment, and do all of this efficiently,” says Karlyn Carnahan, a research director with Celent’s Insurance practice and coauthor of the report.

“Insurers’ IT organizations are looking for a platform to enable an agile IT department in order to facilitate great IT/business alignment. This means a highly configurable system with a variety of strong, granular tools, including tools to manage the testing and the release cycle,” says Donald Light, Director of the Americas Property/Casualty Practice and coauthor of the report.