Using partnership to benefit all parties

Here is an interesting example of how using cloud services can open up a surprising range of partnership options.

Church Mutual Insurance Company (Church Mutual) and Tech Mahindra have formed a partnership aimed at continuing the development of a new cloud based policy processing system for the insurance company.

Merrill-based Church Mutual is in practice the leading insurer of religious institutions in the United States, with 935 employees spread across the nation. As such, it is therefore typical of many mid-sized businesses that facing up to the issue of whether they should embrace exploiting cloud services, and if so, how.

In the case of Church Mutual the decision was to make the move and begin developing a new policy processing system several years ago. But development of such services does require skills and expertise that stretch the resources available to mid-sized businesses. So Church Mutual has now entered into an agreement that will have, for some, memories of old-style outsourcing deals, for it  has transfered ownership of the system to Tech Mahindra.

“Tech Mahindra brings a high level of system integration expertise for global insurance players,” Church Mutual President and CEO Mike Ravnsaid,“With them maintaining the policy administration system going forward, our company will be able to focus our technology efforts and resources on strategic work. This move will save us development and maintenance costs for years to come.”

As part of the engagement, Tech Mahindra would be converting the existing Policy administration and billing systems into a cloud based model and take this product along with Church Mutual to the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cloud service providers in US market.

The focus of this cloud model would be faster processing and Line of Business rollouts using Insurance Product Modelling. With this cloud model, Insurance carriers can focus their attention on their core business and technology can convert costs from Capex to an Opex-oriented model.

“Our in-depth understanding of the insurance business processes has enabled us to design solutions that will help insurance customers derive the best value from their IT investments. We are proud to partner with Church Mutual in this digital transformation journey,” said CP Gurnani, MD & CEO, Tech Mahindra.

The goal of the partnership is to create a state-of-the-art system that supports Church Mutual’s strategic growth needs. But it also has the potential of an economic side benefit for both companies.

This will be a technology that other insurance companies may want to purchase, providing Church Mutual and Tech Mahindra with potential royalties from future licencing fees.

Tech Mahindra has a track record of installing solutions for the insurance industry and its Insurance Practice has an experienced team of domain experts. It is partof the Mahindra Group that employs more than 180,000 people in over 100 countries, and now boasts of some major names in the insurance industry as customers.