Case study: Liverpool Victoria

Barber: it should not matter which technology we use, just that it works

Liverpool Victoria (LV) is intent on getting integration right. The insurance company is pursuing growth and cannot afford to worry about the technology fit of any company it acquires.

“The company has made a strategic decision to support growth through acquisition, but an acquisition is not necessarily chosen for the technology platform on which it runs,” says Jonathan Barber, LV group IT director.

He says LV is similar to other financial services organisations, having grown with a variety of products-based systems whose components are tall and thin rather than horizontal.

Knitting together the business is a complex operation and Barber’s aim is to create an architecture that can support LV’s plans for growth and yet still sustain its diversity.

“We are implementing an architecture to lower costs and deliver higher performance by lifting our service users above any specific technology components,” says Barber.

“It should not matter to the service user which technology we are using to deliver the service, just that it works.”

LV is using a number of integration tools, including Edge IPK’s edgeConnect software, an online presentation layer, to reduce the development time and cost of building front-end applications.

The software integrates with LV’s quote engines, with the input of applicant data and corresponding return quote delivered via a web services layer.

“It provides a common window into the services available below the waterline,” says Barber.

“The general insurance business is moving into the aggregator market, and on a traditional mainframe platform producing a quote to an aggregator is costly as it is an intensive process involving lots of computer processing power.”

Barber says the IPK technology will allow the firm to launch products easily, change prices quickly and support business needs.

In addition, adopting a more component-based architecture will allow LV to perform a more sophisticated analysis of costs for each business unit and enable the company to respond rapidly to market changes by investing IT resources for more return.

“It will be easier to price use of our technology services, rather than allocate lump costs on a somewhat artificial basis,” says Barber.

To support the transition, LV is planning to terminate its 100 per cent outsourcing relationship and is instead re-establishing in-house capability and sourcing services from a number of best-of-breed partners.

“These new relationships will help us to move out of our heritage environment and to implement the new architecture so that we can outperform our competitors,” says Barber.