The Computerworld Honors Program
Honoring those who use Information Technology to benefit society
LOCATION:
Duluth, GA, US

YEAR:
2007

STATUS:
Laureate

CATEGORY:
Finance, Insurance and Real Estate

NOMINATING COMPANY:
Palm

ORGANIZATION:
Primerica Financial Services

PROJECT NAME:
Palm Treo Smartphones

Short Summary
Primerica Financial Services, a subsidiary of Citigroup, provides insurance and asset management services including; term life insurance, mutual funds, variable annuities, loans, long-term care insurance and legal services primarily to middle income Americans. The company is headquartered in Duluth, Georgia with approximately 100,000 licensed independent sales agents, many operating as part-time employees, working remotely across North America and serving some 6 million clients. It also now has some presence in the UK and Spain. Primerica had 2006 net income of $570 million on revenues of $2.24 billion and issued $87.5 billion in term life insurance.
The company employs a direct sales approach, with agents conducting business at the client's "kitchen table," a colorful term connoting Primerica's grass roots method of selling face-to-face to middle-income Americans in their homes. The use of mobile technology provides significant advantage under such a business model by reducing redundancy and errors stemming from excessive paperwork and by significantly cutting down on the time needed to process and submit client applications. Lastly, it brings business intelligence to the agent at the point of sale – the client's kitchen table.
Primerica has 31,000 sales representatives using Palm handhelds and smartphones with a Primerica custom built Palm OS application, called TurboApps, to complete insurance applications in the client's own home. Over 190,000 electronic life applications have been processed since the release of TurboApps and over 55% of the company's life insurance applications are now being submitted electronically. Prior to this solution, Primerica had a manual process requiring the sales agent to fill out paper applications at the client's home, make copies, and then mail the original application to the home office.


Introductory Overview
Agents of Primerica Financial Services are using 31,000 Palm handhelds and smartphones to complete insurance applications in the comfort of a client’s own home. Primerica developed its own customized Palm OS application – called TurboApps – to run on a variety of Palm devices, including the latest Palm handhelds and Palm Treo smartphones.

Primerica provides its 6 million clients with financial products and services, such as term life insurance, mutual funds, variable annuities, loans and long-term care insurance. With up to 60 percent of applications pouring in the last week of each month, processing the high volume of paperwork was very challenging.

The company decided it needed a paperless process and a powerful mobile device. Primerica chose to develop on the Palm OS platform in part because the majority of its agents and executives already were users of Palm products, ranging from handheld devices that were primarily used to organize calendar, contacts and personal information to advanced all-in-one devices that include email and cell phone capabilities. Familiarity with Palm devices made the learning curve virtually flat.

In addition, the Palm OS platform is flexible enough to expertly handle applications customized for the needs of particular industries, from healthcare to finance. Palm handhelds and smartphones met Primerica’s system requirements for powerful, portable, affordable devices with the ability to handle the customized TurboApps application. Now sales agents can synchronize large volumes of sensitive information, completing the application process in just minutes. In the past, this process took several days.

“We needed a technology that could handle an extensive scope of information and also ease the processing burden on our agents,” said Tom Swift, executive vice president of field technology at Primerica. “With TurboApps running on Palm handhelds and smartphones, our agents have access to the applications necessary to get the job done. Being able to process apps quicker with fewer mistakes is a win for clients, agents and the company.”

Palm handhelds and smartphones running the custom-built TurboApps application help Primerica agents do the following:
• Minimize errors and incomplete applications by guiding them through the process;
• Provide clients with the best service possible;
• Keep client information more secure;
• Save time by not having to enter redundant data or wait for postal deliveries;
• Speed turnaround time;
• Submit applications as soon as their next synchronization; and
• Submit client payments faster.

Benefits
Has your project helped those it was designed to help?   Yes

What new advantage or opportunity does your project provide to people?
Primerica now has over 31,000 activated sales agents able to run the custom-built TurboApps software application on Palm OS devices. This helps Primerica agents minimize errors and incomplete applications by guiding them through the process. It provides clients with consistent, quality service and keeps client information more secure than paper documents would. It saves time for agents as they do not have to enter redundant data or wait for postal deliveries. It accelerates overall turnaround time with agents submitting applications as soon as their next synchronization. It enables agents to submit client payments faster and in turn receive their commission payments sooner. It takes anywhere from several days to a week for agents filing manually to receive their commission checks, while electronic filing cuts this down to one day.
The electronic filing process alleviates the bottleneck caused by manual filing of erroneous and incomplete life applications filed in the last four days of each month. Over 190,000 electronic life applications have been processed since the release of TurboApps and over 55% of the company's life insurance applications are now being submitted electronically. As stated under business considerations, of the 31,000 life insurance applications filed per month, a large percentage were incomplete and 25% required follow up by staff at the home office.
Redundancy is eliminated by the electronic collection and submission process. For instance, the Financial Needs Analysis (FNA) form and the life insurance application share 40 common data fields, which need only be entered once with the electronic process.


Has your project fundamentally changed how tasks are performed?   Yes

How do you see your project's innovation benefiting other applications, organizations, or global communities?
Primerica's success with TurboApps has been well publicized. As a result, employees of the company have been invited to speak and present at industry conferences around the country to assist other organizations in their efforts to automate processes and eliminate paper to the maximum extent possible, and in the process issuing business more efficiently and in a more compliant manner.

Other Citigroup subsidiaries have consulted with Primerica regarding implementing similar solutions for their own organizations.

Internally, Primerica is just starting to scratch the surface with TurboApps for Life Insurance. Plans are well underway to extend TurboApps to other lines of business including Mutual Funds, Variable Annuities, Loans, and the paperwork that a new recruit completes when they want to join the organization as a sales representative. When fully implemented, the potential audience that can benefit from the solution will grow from 100,000 to over 250,000.

The Importance of Technology
How did the technology you used contribute to this project and why was it important?
Prior to the implemenation of TurboApps Primerica had approximately 13,000 PDA users, 95% of which used a Palm device v. Windows Mobile device. By choosing to continue in the Palm environment, the learning curve for Primerica's existing user base was nearly flat. In addition, the entry price for Palm devices allowed virtually any representative to participate - the cost of the device was not an impediment to adoption. The commission-only sales force is responsible for purchasing their own office equipment and supplies. To require the agents to purchase expensive client devices in order to leverage the solution being considered would certainly have resulted in a failed project.

Also, while most of Primerica's sales force preferrred the Palm, a sub-set indicated a preference for Windows Mobile, now supported by Palm. To support this in the future, Primerica developed TurboApps using a development tool that can deliver support of the Palm OS and the Windows Mobile OS with a single set of TurboApps source code. Primerica is not currently supporting Windows Mobile, but with this development tool is poised to be a turnkey solution should Primerica decide the time is right to green-light the use of Windows Mobile devices. Support would likely be limited to Windows Mobile devices currently manufactured by Palm.

Originality
What are the exceptional aspects of your project?
The rapid success of TurboApps almost speaks for itself. It is exceptional in that all stakeholders - Home Office, Sales Force, and the Client - benefit greatly from the application. The only real barrier is the end user's reluctance to adopt the technology, and great care has been taken to make it as uncomplicated and easy to use as possible. It is truly a win-win-win solution. It is inexpensive, easy to learn and use, highly mobile/portable, secure, and streamlines and simplifies what was once a very complicated and manual paper process. Every aspect of the process has been automated.

How is it original?
To Primerica's knowledge, including feedback from Palm and state Department's of Insurance, there is not another company in the industry using as robust a solution at the point of sale to complete the entire life insuarnce application process, including underwriting logic and electronic signature capture. In addition to a completely electronic process for the client, the TurboApps back office component automatically creates, indexes and stores a digital image of all required paperwork, making the TurboApps process a truly paperless and automated solution for the client, agent and home office.

Is it the first, the only, the best or the most effective application of its kind?   All of the above

Success
Has your project achieved or exceeded its goals?   Exceeded

Is it fully operational?   Yes

How many people benefit from it?   30,500

If possible, include an example of how the project has benefited a specific individual, enterprise or organization. Please include personal quotes from individuals who have directly benefited from your work.
TurboApps has had a tremendous impact on Primerica's business, benefiting Home Office, Sales Force and clients.

TurboApps benefits the Home Office by simplifying workflow, eliminating mail, scan and data entry associated with the manual paper process. In addition, all deficiencies associated with the paper process are corrected at the point of sale, eliminating special handling of incomplete applications.

Primerica's sales force has benefited greatly from the project. As mentioned earlier, the $200 cost of a device allows almost every rep to participate; the user-friendly GUI and built-in business logic reduces training and office manager's work load; record-keeping is completely automated and thus greatly simplified; redundant data collection is eliminted; faster time-in-process results in faster commission payment. To quote one of Primerica's top producing agents: "TurboApps is unbelievable! Once you start using this software, you'll never want to go back to paper. This is especially great if you're technology challenged. It doesn't allow errors so your submitted app is perfect everytime!" Senior National Sales Director Shane Rudman, Overland Park, KS

The client benefits because confidential information is password protected and encrypted - much more secure than paper. Also, because TurboApps does not allow submission of an incomplete applcaition the client's policy is issued much faster.

How quickly has your targeted audience of users embraced your innovation? Or, how rapidly do you predict they will?
The TurboApps software application for Palm handhelds and smartphones has met with great success for Primerica. It has truly been a "if you build it they will come" type of application. This was the case from the immediate launch in July 2005 with over 5,000 Palm handhelds activated within the first 30 days.
About 10% of the sales agents using Palm handhelds have moved over to using Palm Treo smartphones. This puts the number of agents using Treos at around 3,000 currently. Primerica expects more to shift over to Treos in line with its future developments that will leverage the real-time advantages of wireless.
Adoption of the solution by sales agents has been steadily ramping. The main inhibitor to adoption has been bureaucracy around state regulation. Those using the solution are also more productive and thus generate more business for Primerica. The 30% of the salesforce using TurboApps are filing 55% of the total applications.
The Primerica Field Tech team also received formal recognition of its achievement from Computerworld as the winner of the publication's "Best Practices in Mobile & Wireless" Award in 2006.


Difficulty
What were the most important obstacles that had to be overcome in order for your work to be successful? Technical problems? Resources? Expertise? Organizational problems?
The nature of the Primerica business model, a network of full-time and part-time agents spread across the country and serving the specific communities to which they belong, is the lynchpin of its strong niche positioning in the financial services industry. However, it posed a challenge for Primerica's Field Technology group as it sought to create an efficient, streamlined insurance application process for its mobile sales force. The Field Technology group, which reports through marketing and leverages the resources of the IT department, took the initiative in analyzing the existing field sales process and then selecting a technology solution that would drastically improve the capture and submission of insurance application information for Primerica's sales agents. The team had many stakeholders to appease in the course of its exploration including; the sales agents, management, customers, the legal, compliance and finance departments, and state regulators. On top of this it had business process considerations, a mandate to keep costs in line for both management and the sales agents, internal and external regulatory requirements pertaining to financial records and privacy, as well as considerations around sales agent adoption and usage of a new solution. The Primerica home office was overwhelmed with paperwork, receiving over 30,000 life insurance applications per month from sales agents. Of these, 50% were incomplete and 25% required follow up with the sales agent. The application process was manual at every stage and necessitated copying, filing, mailing, depositing checks, scanning, and data entry.

Often the most innovative projects encounter the greatest resistance when they are originally proposed. If you had to fight for approval or funding, please provide a summary of the objections you faced and how you overcame them.
The commission-only sales force is responsible for purchasing their own office equipment and supplies. To require the agents to purchase expensive client devices in order to leverage the solution being considered would certainly have resulted in a failed project. As with any IT project, management must be appraised of the costs involved and must be convinced of the value. The Field technology group faced initial skepticism from management around the success of the project as to whether it would be worth the opportunity cost to commit the time and resources needed. Each state has its own laws pertaining to life insurance. Any technology solution must adhere to these guidelines for each state. This is a slow process that can take years for approval at the state level. Primerica has roughly 100,000 sales agents in the field, 75% of which are part time. The sales agents differ in age, income, demographics, and in relative levels of comfort with technology. The need for a simple, user friendly and cost effective solution was an important factor. The sales agents are highly mobile workers since they need to meet with their clients at the client's home or business. Therefore, while electronic filing would certainly cut down the inefficiencies of paperwork, a truly mobile solution would be needed to eliminate it and to further streamline the process. The solution would need to keep information confidential and secure. It would be important for information to be secure while stored on the device as well as be encrypted during transmission over public networks.
Digital/Visual Materials
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