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UCT DATA CONVERSION SOFTWARE & SERVICES SUPPORT GAFRI’S “GROWTH THROUGH ACQUISITION” STRATEGY
UCT PROVIDES A FIXED-PRICE TURNKEY SOLUTION WITH AN XML TARGET
UCT CONVERTS MULTIPLE LINES OF BUSINESS IN A MULTI-PHASED APPROACH
ACCURATE: 300,000 ANNUITIES CONVERTED WITH A 99.96% ACCEPTANCE RATE!
FAST: 350,000 UL AND VUL RECORDS CONVERTED IN 14 MONTHS
UCT provides offsite support and training for an in-house conversion
Universal Conversion Technologies’ (UCT) data conversion tool and services support GAFRI’s “growth through acquisition” strategy
Great American Financial Resources Inc. (GAFRI) Overview:
Great American Financial Resources Inc. (GAFRI) originated in 1992 as the holding company for the annuity and life insurance operations of American Financial Group. AFG owns more than 80 percent of GAFRI's outstanding common stock and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: AFG). AFG's principal property and casualty insurance subsidiary is Great American Insurance Company.
The company’s principal subsidiary, Great American Life Insurance Company®, began marketing insurance products in 1959 and has become a leader in providing retirement annuities to the education market. GAFRI now provides consumers with a broad range of financial resources, including fixed and variable annuities, and long-term care, life and supplemental insurance.
GAFRI is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: GFR).
For more information, including company news and investor relations information, visit the company’s web site at www.gafri.com.
GAFRI’s Business Challenge:
A key GAFRI strategic initiative is to grow through opportunistic acquisition of blocks of business. In order to effectively implement this growth through acquisition strategy, GAFRI needs to quickly and efficiently move the newly acquired blocks of business to their single-platform policy administration system, PDMA’s LifePRO®.
One of GAFRI’s technical core competencies is their knowledge of the LifePRO system and their ability to maintain a scalable model at a low incremental cost. The company has chosen to remain focused on this core competency and leverage partnerships with other technology experts to utilize their respective products and services as needed to support the GAFRI acquisition and growth effort.
Having just acquired a book of business that required the conversion of 30,000 fixed annuities, GAFRI looked for a trusted partner who could spearhead the data conversion portion of the project.
The Solution:
UCT was chosen for this conversion project due to their unique data conversion tool (DCA) complemented by a staff with proven experience in insurance data conversions.

Given our strategy for growth, data conversion is an ongoing effort for us rather than a one time event. We didn’t want the data conversion efforts to cause our staff to interrupt other IT projects that were already in progress and take us off track. So, we made a decision to identify a partner who had a core competency in insurance data conversions to provide us a conversion ‘bridge’. It was an easy choice, since UCT has an outstanding reputation in the industry with the bench strength and tools to deliver quality data conversions from virtually any existing insurance policy administration system that we might come across.

Dale Wilcox
Vice President of Strategic Systems and Model Office
GAFRI
The conversion effort was not as simple as just pulling data from the source administration system. The seller had implemented many manual processes and workarounds to overcome functional and technology shortcomings in their environment. The result was a variety of data sources that needed to be tapped for the conversion, including everything from the source system to spreadsheets to shoeboxes with index cards. All of the data was collected and, where necessary, brought into external data tables in preparation for the conversion.
All the data was validated during the conversion process with any abnormalities being reported and necessary corrections made to ensure valid data and quality results.
UCT provided their conversion expertise, strength in numbers, and their Data Conversion Architect (DCA) conversion tool to perform their first conversion project for GAFRI (30,000 fixed annuities). The entire conversion project took approximately six months. GAFRI acknowledges that the project could have been completed sooner, but external issues uncontrollable by GAFRI or UCT caused a couple of delays that extended the project timeline. In fact, according to Mr. Wilcox, UCT had the data mapping done far ahead of schedule.
Involved in the project were two application developers and two business analysts from GAFRI with Dale Wilcox serving as the project’s sponsor. GAFRI also utilized a business analyst from the company providing the source data to assist in the effort with their knowledge of both the data and the source system.
UCT personnel were on-site for seven days to conduct training, install the DCA tool, and perform the data mapping. The bulk of the remaining UCT involvement in the conversion effort was provided remotely, saving GAFRI both time and cost throughout the project.

UCT brought more to the table than just tools and conversion know-how. They also provided very effective project management and training. UCT came on- site, gave our staff an overview of the product and walked us through the data mapping to ensure knowledge transfer through the project.

Dale Wilcox
Going Forward:
With the success of their initial conversion, UCT earned its place as one of GAFRI’s strategic partners. With the data mappings in place as a byproduct of the first conversion project, GAFRI knows it is an even simpler process to convert additional blocks of business as they move forward with their acquisition strategy.

UCT has earned the right to be a key strategic partner. They exceeded our expectations with a successful conversion project. They did most of the work remotely, which made this a very cost effective approach without compromising the quality of the results.

Jeff Wolverton
Chief Information Officer
GAFRI
UCT PROVIDES A FIXED-PRICE TURNKEY SOLUTION WITH AN XML TARGET - Back to Top
MONY Annuities Division strategy called for a lean, scalable infrastructure to support flexible and innovative product design and ease of doing business in service delivery with channel partners and clients. Strategy execution required consolidation of multiple legacy mainframe systems to a single technology platform for all annuity products. Universal Conversion Technologies (UCT) delivered with solid & proven conversion tools and services.
The MONY Group Overview:
The MONY Group Inc. (NYSE: MNY), with $55 billion in assets under management and administration, is a financial services firm that manages a portfolio of member companies. These companies include MONY Life Insurance Company, The Advest Group, Inc., Enterprise Capital Management, Matrix Capital Markets Group, Inc., Lebenthal, a division of Advest, Inc., and U.S. Financial Life Insurance Company. These companies manufacture and distribute protection, asset accumulation and retail brokerage products and services to individuals, corporations and institutions through advisory and wholesale distribution channels. Additional company information is available at www.mony.com.
MONY’s Business Challenge:

In January, 2002, MONY made a strategic decision to align the organization with a line of business focus. Also, MONY planned to grow their business through channel penetration, including entering into the independent brokerage channel market. With this decision came the need to offer attractive products and services to the independent agents in addition to the captive career financial professionals.

Taking a waterfall approach to their strategy, MONY first determined the products they would like to offer based on consumer profiles and buying preferences and then designed the appropriate business processes to enable them to deliver and service effectively while also attracting the desired channel partners. Only with clear strategy and a well- defined business plan did MONY then look to the technology that would enable their vision.

Key to MONY’s approach was the close partnership between their business and IT operations with common strategic business objectives focused on the good of the company. MONY made a conscious decision to enable the business side to take control of their own destiny, knowing they would need to work in concert with the IT organization to achieve the desired results. Business and IT are closely aligned at MONY as they focus on attaining common objectives and selecting and working with outside vendor partners to complement their in-house skills and resources.
The Solution:
With the vision and strategic plan defined, MONY’s Annuities Division decided to look to new technology to offer the desired flexibility in both product and process design to support current and future product offerings. In addition, they opted to consolidate their various legacy mainframe contract administrative systems (VANTAGE, CyberLife, and their in-house developed TOPS) and move all in force annuity products to the new platform to better support new product introduction and product enhancements/modifications, while also reengineering backoffice new business and customer service processes, and reducing overall maintenance costs. After an extensive RFP and evaluation process, the single-platform selected was the AdminServer AdminLife&Annuity (AL&A) System, chosen due to the underlying technology, product and process design flexibility, and the commitment to XML and ACORD standards throughout the system design.
While the business and IT operations worked with AdminServer to design the new products and business processes, MONY needed to simultaneously address the formidable task of converting the in force blocks of business to the new environment. With limited in-house experience and the concerns of too expensive, too complex, and little payback; MONY sought an outside expert to assist in the conversion effort.
MONY selected Universal Conversion Technologies (UCT) to spearhead the conversion effort, in large part due to UCT’s proven track record in the insurance industry and their knowledge of the intricacies of the insurance transactions and MONY’s existing administration systems. The internal IT staff was an integral part of the conversion team, but MONY looked to UCT to guide them through the process and provide the necessary conversion tools and expertise to ensure a smooth and quality conversion effort.
The fixed price contract offered by UCT was also quite unique and enabled MONY to mitigate their financial risk and make their decision based on a known cost. Other conversion consultants MONY evaluated offered a large range of costs with too many “it depends”. While the low-end estimates were palatable, the range often spanned millions, with the high end far too great and too risky.

Our decision to work with UCT on our conversion effort has proved to be a good one. In addition to their proven expertise and fixed price contract, we found that UCT brought tremendous discipline and project management to the conversion effort. They understood that conversion is more science than art and were able to apply their past experiences and knowledge gained over the years. UCT brought rigor to the process and gave our team a clear path of execution.

Carol Macaluso
Vice President – Chief Financial Officer, Annuities Division
MONY Life Insurance Company
The Implementation:

Critical to our success was that we started the implementation with a new platform and a ‘blank sheet’ approach born out of process design rather than trying to implement a technology around an existing product and business process. We really used the new environment as a way to implement the ‘ideal’. We intentionally started with a simple product with a relatively small inforce base, enabling us to get a quick hit and build the team’s confidence. This controlled and pragmatic approach also allowed us to master the AdminServer platform, test and refine the conversion process, and learn to work well together as a team with our vendors.

Carol Macaluso
The initial implementation included a concurrent effort that entailed an initial conversion along with the development of a new fixed annuity product on the AdminServer solution. As the development of the new product and related business processes was underway, the implementation team was also duplicating an existing product, adjusting business processes, testing product and data, data mapping, transferring the data, and performing balance checks.
Both efforts were extremely successful and a pleasant surprise from the conversion included minimal out of balance and very few policies/transactions that required research. There was little need for exception handling, due to the high quality of the source data as well as the UCT conversion software and methodology. However, the initial system converted was a fairly new product without a great deal of history. As conversion efforts continue with older blocks of business, MONY does anticipate uncovering a greater number of surprises and suspect data.

Working closely with our vendors (UCT and AdminServer) made the initial implementation very successful. UCT’s discipline and experience proved invaluable in the effort and the AdminServer solution has the flexibility in product and process design as well as the capacity we needed.

E.P. Rogers
Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer
The MONY Group
Benefits to MONY:

Benefits to MONY include a streamlined new business process, with MONY now able to process a fixed annuity application in an average of 10 minutes as compared to 20 minutes in the previous environment.

With the single AdminServer platform, MONY is seeing a significant gain in end user efficiencies. The user benefits are obvious with this holistic approach in that there is no need for users to master multiple systems or toggle between environments.

Savings in IT maintenance costs appear as disparate legacy environments are no longer supporting the Annuities product line.
UCT CONVERTS MULTIPLE LINES OF BUSINESS IN A MULTI-PHASED APPROACH - Back to Top
Universal Conversion Technologies’ (UCT) data conversion enables ANICO to consolidate multiple policy administration and client systems for common client view and easy, cost-efficient system maintenance
American National Insurance Company (ANICO) Overview:
American National Insurance Company is headquartered in Galveston, Texas. American National has over $14 billion in assets and is rated A+ (Superior) by A.M. Best Company, and AA (Very Strong) by Standard & Poor’s. The American National family of companies offers a broad line of products and services, which include life insurance, annuities, health insurance, personal lines property and casualty insurance, credit insurance and pension plan services. American National’s major insurance subsidiaries include American National Life Insurance Company of Texas, Standard Life and Accident Insurance Company, Garden State Life Insurance Company, American National Property and Casualty Company, American National de Mexico, Compania de Seguros de Vida, S.A. de C.V. and the insurance subsidiaries of Farm Family Holdings, Inc. consisting of Farm Casualty Insurance Company, and United Farm Family Insurance Company.
For more information, including company news and investor relations information, visit the company’s web site at www.anico.com.
ANICO’s Business Challenge:
ANICO had been utilizing multiple out-of-date legacy systems that were not only cumbersome and costly to maintain, but did not provide any ‘householding’ ability to provide a common view of the client. With multiple policy administration systems and multiple client systems, it was virtually impossible to depict an accurate customer profile, impacting both client service and cross-selling potential.
With ANICO’s decision that their current Life70 (internal name Plus74) and Vantage One environments had essentially reached their end-of-life, ANICO opted to utilize more current technologies and software to support all their lines of business and provide the much needed common client system. But, with this decision came the task of system evaluation and the daunting task of converting years of policy and client history and transactions.
The Solution:
With the target systems selected (ANICO’s existing CyberLife systems), requirements for system modifications and the data conversion effort were clearly defined. ANICO chose to look to the systems vendors to primary expertise on the necessary functionality modifications, while choosing to engage Universal Conversion Technologies (UCT) for the majority of the data conversion effort. This strategy was chosen by ANICO in their effort to work with Best of Breed solution and service providers, with UCT selected due to their core competency and successful track record of insurance industry data conversions.
UCT was engaged to perform all conversions to the CyberLife system:
Schedule of Anico Conversions by Phase
Legacy System
Line of Business
Target System
Plus74 (Life70) Garden State Life subsidiary traditional life CyberLife
Vantage One UL CyberLife
Plus74 (Life70) ISWL CyberLife
Plus74 (Life70) Trdaitional Life CyberLife
Plus74 (Life70) Home Service MDA CyberLife
Plus74 (Life70) All Industrial Policies CyberLife
Total conversion effort: approximately 3 million policies!
ACCURATE: 300,000 ANNUITIES CONVERTED WITH A 99.96% ACCEPTANCE RATE! - Back to Top
Case Study for Aid Association for Lutherans (AAL – now Thrivent Financial for Lutherans)
Annuities conversion eased by UCT.
300,000 annuities converted from a LifeComm system to LIDP’s Administrator with an incredible conversion acceptance rate of 99.96%. The final conversion, run the weekend of March 3, 2002, generated over 4.3 million transactions and involved $9.4 billion in funds. Of 310,215 policies, 310,092 converted automatically, generating the amazing success rate. The remaining 123 policies errored out and were manually corrected.
AAL Vice President, MIS Division, Mike Braun described how UCT people helped the conversion effort. “UCT Business Analysts were able to do much of the initial data mapping and data extraction programming with minimal (AAL) assistance. Their data mapping and conversion software allows the business analysts to write very detailed business logic that is translated directly into program code for the data conversion. It eliminates most of the errors that often occur in the communication between business analysts and programmers. They also document and track things extremely well, so we are confident that things won't get lost or forgotten in the conversion process.”
“ Working with UCT has allowed us to devote internal resources to other areas of the project. We have been very pleased with their experience and talent.”
FAST: 350,000 UL AND VUL RECORDS CONVERTED IN 14 MONTHS - Back to Top
Case Study for a major US life insurance provider
The problem: Convert 350,000 UL and VUL policies to a new administration system with minimal impact on customer service.
A major US life insurance provider was looking for a turnkey data conversion solution that included modifications, interfaces, and conversion services. After more than two years and several iterations, their own in-house study concluded that the job required a three-phase effort totaling 30 months and millions of dollars. When three major consulting companies were called in, two stated that the time line was too short and the budget too small. The third simply refused to bid.
Then UCT stepped in, with a bid of 14 months and only 75% of the provider’s own projected budget.
The first, and most difficult, phase of the conversion completed with 180,000 Variable Universal Life policies converted from the legacy system over a weekend, with a total of 17 transaction errors out of an excess of two million transactions. That’s an acceptance rate of 99.9998 per cent! With 3.9 billion dollars of cash accumulation values converted for 18 variable accounts and one fixed account, the total out-of-balance figure was $1500, which is within rounding error!
On the basis of this outstanding success the provider agreed with UCT to combine the second and third phases of the conversion, to bring the complete project in even farther ahead of schedule, and at a total cost about 35% lower than the original budget projections.
How did it go? The second phase converted over 150,000 policies in a weekend (3,000,000 transactions), of which only 14 processed with errors (5 actual policies). That’s a transaction error percentage of .00047.
What’s more, the UCT staff accomplished most of their conversion effort offsite; with less than 6% of the total time onsite tying up the provider’s resources. That’s another hidden savings in the UCT methodology.
The Program Director said, "We wanted to take some risks without sacrificing quality to dramatically reduce our costs and schedule for this project. UCT's insurance industry and conversion experience as well as their tool set mitigated some of that risk for us. The project results say it all. UCT was instrumental in the success of this project".

The Corporate Sponsor for the project said, "The high level of communications, teamwork and commitment of all members of the joint team made this project a huge success. Any obstacles that arose during the project were resolved because the team members were open, creative and flexible to issue resolution. The team did an outstanding job."