Whether the focus is on life insurance, health insurance, annuities, long term care coverage or some variation on the above, agents, financial advisors and carriers have their hands full trying to differentiate products and determine the best course for their customers.
Fortunately, software vendors are offering a variety of solutions to meet both general and specific needs in both the sales process and account management. Following are some of the latest entries.
o Sungard announced that it has added unified managed account (UMA) capabilities to WealthStation, a wealth management technology solutions platform that helps financial advisors manage their high-net-worth clients' assets.
According to SunGard, Salt Lake City, Utah, WealthStation 2.0 helps financial advisors at banks, broker/dealers and independent advisory firms to consolidate assets from multiple accounts into one central planning and decision-making environment. Advisors can then access multiple investment programs on a single platform from one point of entry. In addition, the company says, the platform integrates the separate workflows of asset allocation and investment selection, "helping advisors spend more time on asset gathering and client-facing activities."
WealthStation is designed to help advisors increase productivity and efficiency in profiling clients, determining appropriate asset allocations, and making investment recommendations in a "point-and-click" environment, says SunGard.
According to Mike Winkel, president of Sungard's Advisor Technologies business unit, "WealthStation helps advisors effectively advise their clients without the constraints of any one investment program or product, helping the advisor to hone strategies specific to the client's needs." He adds that the platform "helps planners to grasp and solve their clients' complex high-net-worth needs at a holistic level, while ultimately helping provide them with a higher level of account customization and improve tax efficiencies.
WealthStation with enabled financial planning, asset allocation and CRM modules is priced at approximately $1,000 per year per user, with discounts applying for multiple users, a company spokesperson says. Further details are available at .
o Camilion Solutions, a provider of product management, underwriting and online sales products for the insurance industry, has announced the release of ProductAuthority V5.1, an enterprise product management solution.
ProductAuthority V5.1 now incorporates foundational standards that make the product fully Web Services compliant, says Toronto-based Camilion. It also incorporates a key ACORD XML Life and Annuity Specification to improve efficiency and manage risk in the annuity sales process.
The new product enables insurers using an open SOA (service-oriented architecture) to more easily and cost-effectively integrate product data and rules into their operational systems, including policy administration systems, the company notes. Product data and rules are stored in Product Authority's central repository, where they can be exposed as Web Services to "all back-end systems that need to be product-aware."
According to Camilion, this eliminates the hard-coding of product data and rules into multiple systems. It also results in increased systems agility, allowing insurers to implement or change products in "days."
