V3locity Delivers Business Agility and Transformative Digital Experience for Life and Retirement Carriers

By Paul Kelly, Sr. Vice President, IT and Managed Cloud Services – Vitech
By Ben Meyvin, Principal Partner Solutions Architect – AWS

Vitech

Group insurance companies provide supplemental health insurance products to employees through their employers.

This segment has strong long-term growth potential, but barriers to success exist for insurers saddled with inflexible legacy policy administration systems. These barriers include increasing competition, ever-higher expectations for customer service, demand for tailored products and solutions, and a complex regulatory environment.

The need for a modern, flexible core system is clear.

Prudential is a Vitech customer and one of the largest group insurance companies in the United States. Vitech is an AWS Partner with the Financial Services Competency and one of the leading providers of financial and benefit administration software.

Hobbled by its legacy administration systems, Prudential faced challenges with bringing new or enhanced voluntary benefits products to market quickly. It also struggled to provide a competitive user experience for all stakeholders: brokers, employers, plan participants, and their own employees.

Prudential wanted a customer-focused platform to position them for success. Prudential chose Vitech’s V3locity policy administration solution powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to grow their business.

“Updating to a modern platform has made us a better partner with brokers and agents,” says Paul Virtell, VP of Product Management at Prudential Group Insurance.

Vitech’s V3locity policy administration solution allows group insurance companies like Prudential to increase agility, accelerate speed to market, and improve customer experience. It provides the ability to seamlessly receive upgrades of the software releases in a secure operating environment, with high quality support from the policy administration solution provider.

With cloud-native technology optimized to run on AWS and a transformative suite of complementary applications that offer full lifecycle business and enterprise functionality, Vitech has been recognized by Gartner as a life and annuity policy administration leader for five years in a row.

V3locity Architecture

To enable long-term, future competitiveness for Vitech’s clients, V3locity includes a robust architecture focused on cloud-native elasticity, resiliency, security, and scale.

It’s built from the ground up on a microservices-oriented architecture, representing a high degree of modularity and componentization that provides both domain-specific and enterprise-wide capabilities.

Deployed natively on the AWS Cloud, V3locity consumes a broad and growing range of AWS services that we’ll discuss in this post.

Figure 1 – V3locity technology stack and services.

The modularity and configurability of V3locity’s architecture has allowed Vitech to create a series of tailored experiences for a wide range of personas, including employers, employees, brokers, and insurance personnel. The result: the increased agility and better customer experience the group insurance market demands.

Digital experiences are configurable using business rules and according to individuals’ preferences. The digital experiences are data-driven, fully responsive, adaptive, and analytics-augmented.

End users interact with V3locity through single-page applications that communicate with the underlying components using REST and GraphQL. The combination of domain-specific and enterprise-wide microservices and a growing number of AWS services further enrich the capabilities of V3locity and V3locity’s digital experiences.

For example, Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Kendra power natural language, self-service capabilities. Amazon Textract provides advanced document image processing, Alexa for Business enables natural language processing, and Amazon QuickSight captures detailed usage analytics.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda functions, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon OpenSearch Service, and Amazon Kinesis provide important infrastructure-level building blocks for V3locity components and digital experiences.

These include elastic computing with infrastructure automation, container-based and serverless deployments, as well as elastic storage for real-time and cost-effective management of relational and object-oriented data, real-time data streams, and full elastic indexing and search capabilities.

System extensibility and open interoperability help pave the way for the increased agility and faster speed to market required by group insurance companies.

V3locity’s extensive library of APIs are managed through the Amazon API Gateway, using Apache Kafka for message-based interoperability. Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, and AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) enable real-time streaming and big data processing for data-level integrations.

V3locity uses a federated integration model to orchestrate Vitech’s cloud-native services and third-party services in the context of the relevant business activities.

The continuous information security advances and offerings made available by AWS help to harden V3locity and protect against information security risks.

V3locity protects the perimeter using AWS Shield Advanced, AWS WAF, and Amazon GuardDuty. V3locity is SOC 2, Type 2 compliant, which significantly reduces the regulatory burden for Vitech’s group insurance clients.

V3locity Application Service

Vitech delivers V3locity via the V3locity Application Service. Optimized for high performance on the AWS Cloud, the integrated platform approach results in newfound business agility and a rapid pace of innovation unavailable in on-premises, co-location, private cloud, or other deployment models.

Customers can rely on Vitech to manage the software directly for ongoing upgrades, troubleshooting, and overall production operations. Customers seamlessly receive upgrades of the V3locity software, releases, and security patches.

With direct access to the software on AWS, Vitech owns all troubleshooting and production support requirements for the V3locity software. This enables you to focus on delivering differentiated value to your own customers.

The V3locity Application Service gains much of its agility and extensibility from V3locity’s microservices-oriented architecture. V3locity services can be deployed and scaled independently, providing clear segregation between business domain-specific services and cross-cutting services such as exception tracking, logging, health checks, externalized configuration, and distributed tracing.

V3locity architecture also provides strong service-level fault isolation, significantly improving overall system resilience.

Microservices provide many advantages, but managing a sophisticated, distributed platform like V3locity is not trivial.

Tracking inter-process communications that traverse multiple, distributed services, assuring data consistency, minimizing latency, and optimizing scaling in a microservices architecture can present significant operational complexity for IT teams. The V3locity Application Service handles all of this complexity while providing full transparency to V3locity users.

Unlike with on-premises, co-location, private cloud, or other policy administration deployment models, you can focus more on your business and no longer worry about a wide range of complex platform and infrastructure services.

Vitech and AWS Collaboration

As an AWS Competency Partner, Vitech has access to a wealth of expertise and support from AWS to build a Well-Architected solution and to innovate using AWS services and capabilities. For Vitech’s customers, this means they can rely on V3locity to comply with the design principles of security, reliability, performance, operational excellence, and cost optimization.

Vitech fosters continuous close collaboration and training with AWS teams. Customers, in turn, benefit from expert-level knowledge of AWS services developed by Vitech’s engineering team. This is particularly critical since V3locity is delivered as a fully managed, hosted service.

The AWS Financial Services Competency is a forward-looking program that anticipates industry trends. Dedicated insurance domain experts and solution architects on our joint Vitech and AWS team continue to innovate on your behalf, delivering a transformative suite of complementary applications that offers full lifecycle business functionality and robust enterprise capabilities.

Innovation at a Faster Clip

The V3locity Application Service includes ongoing upgrades to the included V3locity services, including the digital experiences, components, and underlying AWS infrastructure.

Vitech uses its AWS lab environment as an innovation hub. Vitech has recently created prototype versions of new AWS-enabled V3locity cloud services that include:

• Amazon Textract for advanced optical character recognition technology that generates smart validations and automated data extraction from non-digital data formats via machine learning.
• Amazon SageMaker for predictive modeling in areas like recommendations to group insurance employers and employees and user journey analytics.
• Alexa for Business and digital bots for common self-service activities like retrieving information.
• AWS Audit Manager to continuously audit AWS usage for compliance with regulations and industry standards.
• AWS Security Hub to perform security best practice checks, aggregate alerts, and enable automated remediation.
• Amazon Detective to analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities.

Summary

Group insurance companies need to provide higher service levels to their stakeholders—employers, employees, brokers, other ecosystem partners, and their own insurance personnel—to remain competitive.

Modernizing policy administration has become a high priority focus area because of the positive impact on user experience, accelerated speed to market, and overall agility.

Using Vitech’s V3locity Application Service allows group insurance companies to exceed the necessary service levels (short-term and long-term) while offloading the management of the associated application and infrastructure services to Vitech, through its collaboration with AWS.

With V3locity, group insurance companies can receive ongoing software upgrades seamlessly and focus significantly more time and resources on growing their businesses.

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Vitech – AWS Partner Spotlight

Vitech is an AWS Financial Services Competency Partner and one of the leading providers of financial and benefit administration software.

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