After US Financial Life was bought by MONY a few years ago, the new corporate parent requested a direct feed of sales by MONY agents, so it could pay commissions and reward points for internal sales incentive programs. MONY further dictated that the data must be in the ACORD XMLife standard format.

For US Financial Life, which runs Genelco on an AS/400, this presented a challenge, according to Eric Simmons, vice president, new business and management information systems.

“We don’t have any experience with XMLife at all,” he said.

With a system written in COBOL, and a small IT shop of just four programmers, he considered hiring a consultant to write a program to create an XML feed. But then when the work was done, the consultant would walk away and his small staff would have to find a way to support it.

Genelco could do the work, but they would have to assign a project manager, their price was high, and they couldn’t meet the deadline Simmons faced.

“Our parent company wanted us to produce the file very, very quickly, and we didn’t have the resources,” Simmons explained.

Simmons turned to Whitehill Technologies in New Brunswick, Canada. Its software uses Microsoft technologies to transform legacy information into data such as XML that today’s applications can use. Simmons negotiated a contract and 10 days later Whitehill dispatched a technologist to the carrier’s offices in Cincinnati, OH.

“They sent someone who had insurance experience, which was helpful,” said Simmons. “He came down on a Monday with the software and spent a day installing it and configuring it on a Windows server. He spent the next two days explaining it to one of our staff while he created the data feed. On Thursday we had the data feed working, and on Friday he went home. It ran without a hitch. I wish life worked that way.”

Stephen Brooks, director of product marketing at Whitehill, is understandably fond of that story.

“This is an ROI (return on investment) dream,” he said. “The first time you run the software it has paid for itself, because you didn’t have to do hundreds of hours of hand coding.”

Whitehill has developed a specialty business of taking structured or unstructured data and automatically rendering it into any file type a customer wants. It started eight years ago formatting bills for law firms and has since expanded into working with banks and large insurance companies. Customers include HSBC, Mellon, CIBC, Allmerica, JPMorgan Chase, and Atlantic Blue Cross Care.

Whitehill’s approach is straightforward – it captures the data, extracts the required information, and renders it into the required format. One of the ways it acquires data is by taking print files from legacy systems – because they can all print, explained Brooks. The most popular approach now is to convert the data into an XML file.

“Our typical customers come to us when they find that some limitation is being imposed by their back-office system. They can’t do what they want with their information. They want to extract the information from the back office and transform it into something useful like Excel, XML, or PDF so they can speed up their business process and make better informed decisions.”

Whitehill runs on Microsoft, added Brooks. “In working with legal clients, we generate Microsoft Word documents using a new feature in Office 2003 called WordML – we were the first commercial vendors to take advantage of that functionality,” he said. “WordML has increased the speed of document production by 100 times. Previously, using OLE with Word we could do 20 documents a minute; now we can do 2,000.”

About half the company’s business is extracting information from legacy systems for online presentment, he added. The repurposed data varies from product information for agents to view in a secure portal to account information so bank customers can check the status of their 401(k)s.

Once the XML data is moved into a relational database, the client can drill down into the underlying data easily. Atlantic Blue Cross Care’s implementation of Whitehill’s software allowed it to produce monthly reports for Veterans Affairs of Canada on prescription drug use for all the veterans – and the software made it easier to provide online access to that information.

For the private banking group at a major Canadian bank, Whitehill provided a way to sort through a morass of information on customer fees and financial advisor commissions. High net worth investors and their financial advisors have the clout to negotiate their own deals, so no two fee structures are alike, explained Brooks.

“As a result, when they had to do their monthly calculations of commissions for the financial advisors and fees for customers, they worked with a database that was more exceptions than rules,” he said. The bank had spreadsheets that took market data from Financial Models Company (FMC) such as share prices, and then ran queries against the database for customer rules and fees. The bank was running up against Excel’s limit of 65,000 rows per spreadsheet, and getting the monthly statements out took days of error-prone manual work.

Now Whitehill takes the disparate data from FMC and from the bank’s SQL Server database of customer information and turns the information into XML. The Whitehill application crunches the numbers and sends out two comma separated files to ADP which cuts the commission checks based on one file and invoices the customers from the other.

“We completely automated what had been a manual, error-prone process; it paid for itself the first time they ran the software,” Brooks said.

www.usfli.com

www.whitehilltech.com