Fidelity & Guaranty Life cuts AppDev costs by 50% and regains employee confidence

Case Study
 

“It took four months to see the ROI on the first project. Employee satisfaction was on the rise and confidence had been regained.”

–VP, IT Strategy & Solution Delivery Fidelity & Guaranty Life

Requirements

Fidelity & Guaranty Life Insurance Company (FGL) provides annuities and life insurance for over 700,000 policyholders across the United States with over 25,000 licensed agents.

For three years, FGL IT had not effectively delivered any strategic IT solutions to the business and had experienced multiple project failures. The business had lost confidence in IT delivery’s capability. IT employees had become demotivated after many failures and the business lacked critical resources to make the necessary changes.

FGL’s IT department had to find a way to resolve these issues and implement an operating model with a successful formula. Agents and policyholders demanded multiple intuitive software platforms to serve the needs of new business models, and FGL needed to find a solution.

Solution

“Celsior offered an onshore/offshore model that fit our requirements. We didn’t know how best to implement such a model, but their willingness to listen to our needs and be transparent throughout the entire process, enabled us to identify a productive and cost-effective road map.”

A game plan was developed that addressed multiple questions:
• How to deliver successfully with a blended model?
• How many people should be offshore?
• How many people should be onsite?
• How to phase the approach?
• Possible bottlenecks and how to address them?

FGL now understands what it takes to successfully begin an operation, create an efficient
software roadmap, and implement a product successfully.

Business Benefits

The new Agent Portal was the first successful project for FGL in three years. The team took a legacy portal and modernized it to improve its capability and the user experience. The portal now allows agents to access customer accounts, stay informed about products and services, and better serve the needs of the customer. The ROI of this portal was evident in just four months with every agent utilizing the portal, having access to information at their fingertips, providing accurate quotes, and improving the customer experience.
 

“Celsior provided a structure that allowed FGL to bring people on and off as they needed. We saved 50% in development and training costs working with Celsior.”

–VP, IT Strategy & Solution Delivery
Fidelity & Guaranty Life

 
FGL adopted an agile approach, and the deliverables were broken down to the point where results were visible to each manager. This brought back confidence in the IT department.

In just 12 months, FGL has been able to successfully deliver 6 projects with the help of Celsior by enabling the increase of their team from just 10 software developers to a hybrid team of 25 software developers and QA testers onshore and offshore. This was all accomplished by implementing Celsior’s blended delivery process model.

Download the PDF version of this case study. For more information, please contact us.