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dvantage by reducing the product development lifecycle.

Insurers also spend a significant amount of time in customizing enrolment materials, benefit summaries, and claim submission forms and reports for a major customer. These activities have a high cost as they require the services of sales, underwriting, compliance, and legal and can wipe out the entire cash flows and profit expectations of the insurer.

Here, data integration plays a significant role in formally defining, marketing and tracking these services and developing them. Data integration allows the insurer to integrate information about its target customers and their use of high cost services and bundles these services with the product to improve the pricing model. This enables an insurer to recover its costs incurred in designing the product and services while providing high end customers with value added services at the same time.

For example, Eurovida[15], a Portuguese life insurer and part of Grupo Banco Popular faced a challenge of providing its customers with the right products in the most cost effective ways while driving growth, profitability and shareholder value. It was only after they deployed an activity-based management system were they able to consolidate customer and product data thereby determining the profitability of products and the costs incurred in delivering the product and service to the target customers.

Marketing and Sales: An immediate advantage of customer data integration in the life insurance industry is the ability to detect and consolidate duplicate records. Eliminating duplicate records result in lowering marketing costs such as postage and production to a great extent. Integrated customer data also benefits sales teams by making information easily available, by improving sales efforts on the right customers and on the right activities, as opposed to spending majority of the time on managing customer inquiries and service calls. Additionally, with integrated customer data, sales teams have a centralized repository of customers past purchases thereby giving them countless opportunities to cross and up sell to customers.

For example, an insurance carrier made an additional $120 million in revenue by increasing its cross/up selling opportunities from 2.2 products per customer to 2.25 products per customer[16].

Max New York Life in India[17] identified that only 7% of its new revenues came from cross selling products to existing customers and only 1% owned more than two policies. However, once the insurer integrated its customer data systems into one single repository it experienced an increase in customer retention by 300 to 400 percent as its sales teams were able to cross sell a second and third product to the customers.

Customer Service and Claims: An insurer's call center is often bogged down with excessive number of follow up calls as it is unable to resolve the customer's issue because of lack of customer data in one single repository. This results in increased costs of millions of dollars to the insurer and also un-satisfied customers.

For instance, it could cost an insurer, lacking a central customer data repository S$9 million a year for handling three million calls at an average cost of $3 per call.

Errors made by the claims department cost millions of dollars to the insurer as well as un-satisfied custom