Columbian Financial Group goes live with FIS's Agency Management System

FIS Software, a provider of enterprise level end to end insurance policy administration systems , today announced that Binghamton, New York based Columbian Financial Group (CFG) has completed the implementation of FIS’s Agency Management System (AMS), a component of FIS’s flagship ALIS policy administration platform. With AMS, CFG now manages its independent agent workforce using a cost effective platform that includes licensing and appointments, account management, hierarchies, and commission management. With the completion of the data migration from CFG’s legacy agency systems, AMS now manages CFG’s 40,000 agents with 100,000 accounts.

In early 2008, CFG selected FIS’s ALIS policy administration platform to support a strategic cost reduction initiative aimed at consolidating CFG’s multiple legacy administration systems acquired mainly through acquisitions. In December 2008, CFG completed the first step in the consolidation initiative by going live with ALIS to support a new line of business. The second step in the initiative was to complete the AMS implementation which paves the way for the next step scheduled for later this year; the conversion of the first major block of in-force policies onto ALIS.

ALIS offers insurers a turnkey solution that supports the complete life cycle of a policy, including: illustrations and quoting, new business processing, forms management, underwriting, reinsurance, billing and collections, customer service, claims management, agency management and accounting. The system is compliant with US regulatory requirements and with Sarbanes-Oxley. The AMS component is fully integrated within the ALIS solution and can also be deployed as a stand-alone enterprise level agency management system independent of the policy administration system.

“We are extremely pleased with the completion of the agency migration to ALIS. This milestone not only supports our system consolidation initiative but gets us another step closer to achieving true straight-through-processing to help us grow the business,” says Peggy Rubin, CFG Senior Vice President. “This effort has been a total team effort between FIS and CFG. They have been an exceptional partner throughout this initiative and we look forward to working together to achieve all of our project objectives.”

“Going live with ALIS AMS represents another important milestone in achieving our objective of assisting CFG to modernize its IT infrastructure to better serve its customers, agents and marketing initiatives,” says Ron Karam, EVP FIS North America. “Our goal is to help establish CFG as a showcase for other insurers that are considering a system consolidation and modernization initiative.”