Accelerating Policy Administration Modernization on AWS with Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA

By Cheng Xu, Principal Solution Architect – AWS
By Bala KP, Sr. Solutions Architect – AWS
By Satyabrat Pradhan, Principal Product Consultant – Cognizant

Cognizant

In today’s life and annuity business, customers expect a seamless buying and post-purchase experience irrespective of the channel they utilize to engage with insurers.

Due to continuous changes in the market environment, insurers are under pressure to rapidly deliver innovative products, increase customer and channel loyalty, and cut operating costs to stay competitive. With legacy policy administration systems, carriers face challenges to meet the ever-increasing need for faster speed-to-market capabilities with scale-up features.

Oracle Insurance Policy Admin System (OIPA) accelerates product development, new product launches, greenfield initiatives, and reduces the overall operational cost. It enables carriers to innovate modern products by leveraging flexible rule-based hierarchical product configuration and provide superior customer service with modern digital capabilities.

With OIPA’s open integration framework and modern digital capabilities, it provides almost zero-touch business process operations and superior digital experience for both internal and external customer.

By following the creed of “intuition engineered” while collaborating with Oracle and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cognizant developed the Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA, a cloud-compatible DevOps solution to automate OIPA setup on AWS, and accelerate the development of multiple new business capabilities in-parallel.

In this post, we will explain how the Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA brings a performant and productive policy administration experience to insurance carriers. Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA facilitates the critical policy admin system capability with seamless setup for both traditional and non-traditional life insurance products such as whole life and term life, as well as universal life, variable universal life, and index universal life.

With over 46,000 professionals and 270+ clients, Cognizant Insurance has a footprint across all major insurance lines of business, and clients include top insurers, reinsurers, and retirement benefits providers. The practice supports insurers in developing and executing IT and business strategies, focusing on core systems, data and analytics, ecosystems, consumer experience, and digital transformation.

Cognizant is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Service Provider (MSP). With its industry-based, consultative approach, Cognizant helps clients envision, build, and run more innovative and efficient businesses.

Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA

OIPA is an adaptive, rules-based policy administration system that provides complete record-keeping and support for all policy lifecycle transactions, such as policy issuing, billing, collections, policy processing, and claims.

With Oracle’s policy administration system, insurers can rapidly adapt to changing business needs and regulatory requirements while supporting straight-through processing (STP) throughout the policy lifecycle.

By bringing together Cognizant’s domain expertise, Oracle’s OIPA for policy administration, and AWS’s automation, intelligence tools, and infrastructure, Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA offers a quick, easy, and low-risk way to host OIPA on the cloud, and enables a highly automated, seamless policy admin experience.

Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA comes with a predefined set of artifacts like solution blueprints, OIPA deployment Terraform, Helm charts, cloud migration process pipelines, and ready-to-use templates that can be reused and extended to the client’s target solution.

Following are three key Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA accelerators, running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS):

Cognizant Rules Deployment Tool: DevOps solution for OIPA integrated with GitHub and provisioning the OIPA instances automatically through click of a button.
Cognizant Map Loader Tool: Enables automated loading of application lookup values and maintains the versioning of non-business rules SQL scripts.
Cognizant Conversion Factory for OIPA: Automated data migration from legacy policy admin system to target OIPA platform. This accelerator creates a framework for data migration including data profiling, transformation, conversion, load, and data audit compare. As part of this transformation, it convert data to the OIPA EAV (entity, attribute, and balue) data model.

Carriers can leverage the following templates to jump-start OIPA product implementations:

New Business and Underwriting template
Whole Life and Term Life product templates
Commission Management template
Claim Management template

Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA provides a digital platform for new life insurance business capabilities by minimizing the manual process and adopting the STP capability. The application supports capturing new business, conducting underwriting, and issuing policies with the initial premium, generating contract packages with e-delivery capability.

All of these steps are achieved with the zero-touch framework of Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA.

Figure 1 – Use case flow diagram.

Architecture Considerations

Cognizant uses Kubernetes as the container platform for Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA, because it provides a powerful and flexible platform for deploying and managing containerized applications at scale. Kubernetes can be complex to set up and manage, however, especially for organizations that are new to containerization or are managing large-scale deployments.

Cognizant’s Industry Solution Group (ISG) OIPA practice team is a strong proponent of fully-managed services and a serverless-first strategy when it comes to application design and architecture. Such an approach brings customers a range of benefits, including reduced operational overhead, improved scalability, increased reliability, enhanced security, and cost savings.

By offloading many of the operational tasks associated with managing infrastructure and services to AWS, organizations can focus on their core business activities and achieve better outcomes.

Amazon EKS is an easy choice for the ISG OIPA practice team because it’s a fully managed service that takes care of the underlying infrastructure—including patching, upgrades, and maintenance of the Kubernetes control plane—allowing customers to focus on building and running business applications with integrations with other AWS services.

Cognizant’s cloud best practices treat governance, observability, data protection, and access management as important as innovation. With the broadest and deepest set of services on AWS, the ISG OIPA practice team can enable, provision, and operate their environment for both business agility and governance control.

For example, Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA uses AWS CloudTrail to enable operational and risk auditing, governance, and compliance. It also uses Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms to improve operational excellence, while using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to securely manage access to AWS resources of OIPA workload.

Cognizant uses Terraform as the standard for infrastructure as code (IaC), which enables the OIPA deployment in a safe, repeatable manner. The ISG OIPA practice team developed configurable Terraform templates and Helm Charts to automatically provision and mange Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA infrastructure resources.

The ISG OIPA practice team adopts DevOps best practices on continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), so that frequent CMOS changes trigger automated builds, tests, and releases rapidly and reliably. Cognizant uses AWS CodePipeline to model, visualize, and automate CI/CD steps for the full release process of Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA.

Figure 2 – Architecture diagram.

Solution Walkthrough

Continuous innovation is a fundamental part of Cognizant product development, which has led to the creation of core frameworks and accelerators for OIPA implementations. Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA has 15+ tools and accelerators enabling faster product implementation and ease of maintenance.

The following section details how Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA delivers business capabilities and better policy administration experience, and the challenges it solves with its key differentiated accelerators.

DevOps and Configuration Management

Insurers use Oracle Insurance Rules Palette (OIRP) to create, modify, and manage business rules. OIPA Internal Version System (IVS) is a version control system integrated with OIPA, and uses Oracle database as its underlying data store to persist business rules.

The tight coupling between business rule management and database bring some challenges to customers:

The complexity of OIPA IVS makes it hard to gain user adoption. Especially for technical users, popular version control and collaborative software development tools such as GitHub are in great demand.
Concurrent product developments using IVS are challenging to manage.
Managing multiple versions of insurance product configurations and business rules can be an involved task.
Business rules versions extraction performs poorly when the number of versions increases over time.
Product configuration deployment with OIRP internal package is via database script. Multi-package deployment is a challenge.
IVS is designed to integrate with other Oracle insurance applications, but may require additional effort and investment to integrate with third-party systems and tools.
Migrating existing product configurations and rules into IVS can be a complicated and time-consuming process.
IVS can be resource-intensive, particularly when managing large or complex insurance product configurations.

To address these challenges, Cognizant designed and implemented the Cognizant Rules Deployment toolset with a philosophy called “Release When Ready.” It essentially reduces the overall release window as much as possible by automating lot of gears within OIPA ecosystem. It’s a cloud-based modern and scalable DevOps solution for OIPA, and is integrated with industry standard version control tool GitHub.

Furthermore, the toolset enables support of multiple development streams in parallel with full release management capability to package and track all OIPA related components. It’s also integrated with Sonar for coding standard validations using custom rules specific to OIPA.

Below are the key differentiators of the Cognizant Rules Deployment toolset:

Create a bridge between OIPA database and GitHub for business rules.
Provide version mechanism for OIPA non-business rules such as IVS related scripts.
Remove the need for version maintenance on OIPA insurance product templates. Instead, the changes are checked into a GitHub branch directly.
Create an environment for OIPA and palette configuration with a click of a button.
Create feature branch in GitHub systematically along with the OIPA environment.
Provide parallel development in multiple OIPA environments.
Provide role-based user access control using GitHub Team and leveraging industry-standard OAuth 2.0 protocol.
Integrate with SonarQube for code quality and coverage inspection.
Integrate with Jira for defect tracking and workflow management.
Provide a mechanism to create and maintain multiple parallel release planning.
Enable quality assurance to initiate package deployment to the choosing environment.
Integrate with popular software development lifecycle tools such as AWS CodePipeline, UrbanCode Deploy, Liquibase, Concourse, and Harness.

Cognizant followed best practice to deploy each tier of the application into separate subnets in a multi-Availability Zone environment for security, availability and reliability. This helps to isolate and secure each tier and provide better control over network traffic between them.

For example, Spring Boot-based microservices in the business tier are deployed to an Amazon EKS cluster in private subnets, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) with Oracle 19c Enterprise Edition is hosted in the private subnet.

Cognizant uses security groups to control inbound and outbound traffic to the application, and network access control lists to control traffic between subnets. It helps to ensure that only authorized traffic is allowed, and that traffic is properly routed between the different tiers.

Contract Package Generation with Serverless Implementation

Once the insurance policy issuance is complete in OIPA, the next step in the policy administration workflow is to generates the contact package. Cognizant developed the Push Driven Architecture (PDA) extension for OIPA by following serverless and event-driven architecture design patterns.

An OIPA event triggers the creation of a JSON message, which is sent to Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), a fully managed message queuing for microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. In addition to SQS, PDA supports other messaging platforms such as Kafka, IBM MQ, and JMS.

Next, an AWS Lambda function processes the message and launches a workflow using AWS Step Functions to orchestrate multiple Lambda functions for the final contract package generation. Finally, contract packages are stored and achieved in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

As an alternative feature offering, Cognizant can leverage Oracle’s OIPA Data message Push (DMP) integration with any messaging and streaming solution to implement contract package generation, as well as push any events to downstream for further processing.

With serverless architectures, Cognizant ISG OIPA practice team can quickly prototype, test, and deploy applications without having to worry about infrastructure setup and management. It helps Cognizant to reduce time-to-market and accelerate innovation.

Cognizant and AWS Collaboration

Cognizant is a leading professional services company transforming clients’ business, operating, and technology models for the digital era. Its unique industry-based, consultative approach helps clients envision, build, and run more innovative and efficient businesses.

Cognizant established a partnership with Oracle’s leading OIPA platform. This collaboration has resulted in 4+ years of engagements, 14+ years of partnership, and 250+ trained OIPA professionals, growing through the train-the-trainer program, collaborations, and joint-marketplace offerings.

AWS equips Cognizant with the necessary tools and infrastructure to effectively run insurance workloads in the cloud, driving operational efficiency and innovation in the insurance industry.

AWS’s comprehensive suite of cloud services—including compute, storage, databases, analytics, and security—empowers Cognizant to deliver secure, reliable, and high-performance solutions to insurance clients. AWS’s global presence ensures low latency and high availability, allowing Cognizant to effectively serve insurance companies worldwide.

Conclusion

Cognizant is one of the first to successfully implement Oracle Insurance Policy Admin System (OIPA) on AWS cloud infrastructure.

Cognizant Insurance Model Office for OIPA providers insurance companies the capabilities to automate OIPA infrastructure provision on demand, faster product implementation with read-to-use templates, and optimize the policy administration modernization timeline and cost.

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Cognizant – AWS Partner Spotlight

Cognizant is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that transforms customers’ business, operating, and technology models for the digital era by helping organizations envision, build, and run more innovative and efficient businesses.

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