Accelerate Product release to market for Insurers through Test Engineering approach

Life and annuity insurers are transforming their core and legacy applications and making significant investments in the latest technologies to reduce costs while improving operational efficiency. They are also launching new products to enable their business to enter new markets and meet customer expectations. These new-age applications and software enable the insurers to connect with their customers, increase the performance of their employees, and digitize their internal business operations.

Mindtree’s Quality Engineering has been consistently helping its life insurance clients achieve ‘Quality @ Speed’ throughout the development stages, by minimizing and reducing repetitive efforts by using Mindtree’s accelerators and various automation technologies. The offering enables a tool driven and automation first approach in application management and testing to accelerate product release to the market. For any legacy modernization or digitization program, our deep domain expertise and differentiated Test Engineering approach make us a preferred IT partner and testing advisor for leading insurers. Mindtree offers customized services for testing in life insurance & annuity based on products and processes, application landscape, as well as the type of technology initiative.

Some of the triggers that drive the need for life insurance & annuity testing include:

• Modernization/migration of existing core systems including policy administration, claims management, and underwriting systems
• Outsourcing of legacy books or closed books requiring consolidation from legacy to target systems
• Shifting to a cutting-edge administration system to enable faster time to market
• One time BAU enhancement in core systems and across the upstream & downstream applications due to new product rollouts, regulatory changes
• Digitization of customer and intermediary interactions
• Back office and front office automation initiatives

Mindtree’s engineering approach is aligned to help accelerate product implementation for the Life and annuity industry. MiPronto is our accelerator that serves as a building block for insurance product set up / configuration and associated test scenario management. The tool helps in associating test scenarios to product and process hierarchy, enables comprehensive test scenario coverage, rapid scaling on business knowledge required for testing, and reusable approach to test strategy definition for every product launch/update.

Mindtree’s test scenario repository for life and annuity business help insurers to jumpstart their testing engagement. This comprehensive repository is an outcome of Mindtree’s rich experience in the life and annuity industry, blended with the knowledge of industry experts. The test cases in the repository support both waterfall and agile methodology.

The repository is further grouped into five suites to address the specific challenges of the life insurers.

• Regression suite comprises of key business areas and functionalities which need to undergo regression for every upgrade of the life insurer ecosystem
• Functional health checker suite consists of key functionalities, which need a continuous monitoring post-production release. For e.g., the quick quote process should be available 24*7 to ensure good customer experience and branding
• Omnichannel experience test suite addresses the challenge of quality assurance in an omnichannel ecosystem comprising of mobile apps, portals, conversational solutions, etc.
• With the Data validation suite, you can make use of real-time data and assure high data quality across both internal and external life insurance systems.
• Access and identity management suite comprises of test scenarios to ensure the security of data as life insurers will be handling a lot of personal information like medical records, driving behavior, etc.

Mindtree assists in devising a testing strategy keeping in mind the nature of the transformation program and the business needs of the life insurer. Mindtree’s offering is distinguished by:

• Domain expertise in life insurance (Life, Annuity and Retirement)
• Consultants and Business Analysts with expertise in the end-to-end policy life cycle and an understanding of business priorities
• Mindtree Minds with industry-standard certifications from professional bodies including LOMA, SRI of US, CII of UK, etc.
• Test management tools and test automation frameworks that significantly reduce testing efforts
• Exposure to COTS products such as V3(Vitech), ALIP (Accenture), AIA (DXC), and Salesforce CRM
• Specialized testing practice supported by BAQA model and testers with expertise and experience in insurance application testing
• Experience in testing of Enterprise systems including SAP S/4HANA & Salesforce covering end-to-end Business Process Testing across multiple connected systems and interfaces
• Optimal Testing using Impact Based Testing (IBT) technique and Reuse of existing suite to enhance and build automated regression suite
• Test Data Management and coordination with interface partners as ‘lead test provider’ for end-to-end test execution of critical business flows
• Quality Gating to ensure appropriate test coverage in each phase. Change and release management process and testing signoff mechanism for all transport to the QA / Prod

Key Benefits

• Faster Time to Market
• Reduced Product development cycle
• Improved test coverage

Success Stories

For a leading life , annuity and retirement provider in North America,

• Contributed to ~50% reduction in IT implementation activities related to Insurance product launch through Quality engineering
• Automated on-demand provisioning of test data that reduced test data generation effort by ~80% while reducing dependency on copy down data from production
• Adoption of Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) model enabled test automation from Day 1 of the sprint cycle
• Service virtualization ensured test continuity by reducing dependency on the availability of services during initial sprints
• Automated regression coverage increased from 35% to >90% while the regression cycle time was reduced by over 60% (from 4.5 days to 2 days)

For a leading UK composite insurer,

• Ensured quality by achieving 98% defect detection efficiency in system and integration testing
• Achieved ~25% effort saving through process centric application testing and reuse
• Achieved ~55% automation coverage for Point of Sale application

For a leading US Group and Voluntary Benefits Admin platform provider,

• Reduced testing cycle time by ~65% for new features & platform capability roll-out
• Improved defect detection rate from 80% to 95%
• Reduced UAT defect leakage rate to ~1.9% per user story, across 1,150+ user stories

For a leading life, annuity, retirement and group benefits provider in North America,

• Reduced resolution time from 3-4 days to 1-2 hours by creating the “Exception framework” to identify issues
• Reduction in manual testing effort by approximately 83%
• Implemented global regression 999 data load for Admin/Quote & role-based track. This cut down the execution time by ~20%
• Implemented “Database Accelerator” that helps every team member to save 70% of the data fixing time