MetLife unified its systems to ensure that its customers are satisfied

Rethink IT, May, 2004

GRID PRINCIPLES AID SECURITY

MetLife is a very large insurance business which serves all 50 US states, and other countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, Portugal, India, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Indonesia.

It operates in most individual insurance businesses such as financial planning, life insurance, annuities, long term care, disability, mutual funds and securities, as well as retirement and savings. It is a big medical insurer in the US and the largest dental insurance business there. It offers accident cover, car and boat insurance and home owners insurance, asset management, mutual funds and real estate.

Currently it has 12m US people on its individual customer file and outside of the US has another 8m, but it touches up to 37m through its employee status in corporate product offerings. It is 88th in the US Fortune 100 with 2003 revenues of $8.9bn, on which it made $620m profit.

It has $331bn of assets under its management and employs over 47,000 people. It claims to be the number one US life insurer, the number one non-medical health insurer and is ranked number one in most group product areas, including life insurance, automobile and homeowner's, and long-term care and dental.

Before implementing Customer Data Integration MetLife's customer data was spread across three different organizations; a retail bank, a mutual funds company and a property and casualty insurer; and five different lines of business (property and casualty, banking, institutional, brokerage and mutual funds).

Customers from 30 separate back office and CRM systems needed to be unified and merged while the logic in the legacy systems continued to operate unharmed.

GRID PRINCIPLES AID SECURITY

When two major US corporations of the size of Citicorp and MetLife both buy the same package to merge their disparate customer data files, you'd be pretty sure that the software house they bought them from would be a household name. Maybe Oracle, or Microsoft, or IBM or SAP.

But tiny private Atlanta-based DWL, is the company that has been setting this new business sector on fire with its new DWL Customer and DWL Money applications.

What DWL offers is a customer data hub, a way of storing all customer knowledge for an entire enterprise, separated from the transaction logic in core legacy systems. It takes in the parties, their relationships, the products they have bought, interactions, campaigns that have affected them and helps retain a privacy wall around client data.

It must also link to business processes such as event notifications and new account openings and processing for duplicate suspects.

DWL clients not only include MetLife and Citi Cards but also JP Morgan Chase, Atlantic Blue Cross Care, Great West Life and Nationwide Insurance. DWL has strategic relationships with IBM, BEA Systems, and Sun Microsystems and integrator alliances with IBM Global Services and Accenture.

Justin Lafayette, chairman and co-founder, says that Citicorp, when it bought the Sears credit card business, was able to bid a higher price due to using DWL Customer. He said Citicorp knew it would integrate its customer data faster, and therefore get more back from the deal sooner, hence it could afford to bid more.