When NEOS launched in 2018, we had a vision to create a leading life insurance business in Australia and to deliver outstanding service for advisers and their clients. So we’re truly thrilled to announce that we recently won the Celent Model Insurer 2022 award for Digital and Emerging Technologies. Celent is a global expert on technology within financial services, so we’re humbled by this achievement.
Winston Churchill once said, ‘A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty’. We like to think we took the path of optimism when we evaluated the Australian retail life market, and identified an opportunity to distinguish ourselves with service excellence.
Before launching, we decided our expertise lay within the delivery of life insurance services, product design, and complex implementation of projects. By the same token, we realised we were not experts in technology and application build. As such, we chose to work with best-of-breed vendors to deliver the technology solutions that are the foundation of the offering:
- Ebix for the application and administration system
- UnderwriteMe for automated underwriting
- Oban for superannuation gateway
- CyTrack for call centre telephony.
The key to innovation was to go back to basics and follow strict design principles. So we started by identifying the pain points in the Australian life market, and then created a service experience that would solve these issues. NEOS looked to align product and technologies to deliver that service experience. We found simplification was the key.
From a technology perspective, we discovered most organisations separated the online application front end from the policy administration back end. NEOS adopted the Ebix system from online application to policy administration. This created a single system for advisers and staff, providing real-time movement of data and enabling advisers to see exactly the same information as our service teams. This made servicing so much easier and faster.
We’re incredibly proud to receive Celent’s Model Insurer of the Year award and we’re extremely grateful to have such great partners to do business with. Without our partners at Ebix, UnderwriteMe, Oban and CyTrack, this award and any future successes would not be possible. We look forward to future shared successes!