"Building long-term sustainable relationships with clients founded upon partnership and understanding" - Shaun Brook, Practice Leader, Indurance Management
Kane Chronicles News: TPA as a Service
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TPA as a ServiceIn today's ever-changing market environment, flexibility is key believe John Uprichard and Nar Almeida Third Party Administration (TPA) providers have long been known to provide clients with cost savings via standardized processes and packaged service offerings. However, this typically comes at an unintended cost; a lack of flexibility in the operating model with most TPAs requiring the customer to choose an 'all or nothing' approach to outsourcing. Today's TPA challenge is to offer greater service flexibility to ensure clients have complete control over how much they outsource. By enabling them to 'dial up or down' the list of provided services, this ensures tailored, cost-effective solutions for the life of the contract. The TPA model must be based upon matching the client's needs with bespoke solutions. In our view, this starts with building an understanding of the client via a requirements gathering process. During these sessions, the discussion should not only focus on the process, people and technology required, but also the distribution model, sales process and what the client considers their core competencies. This establishes a clear understanding of what the client sees as their competitive advantage and whether or not they want to retain any of those operational or infrastructure pieces in-house. The provider must also look at things such as downstream extracts and external third party communications to ensure accurate replication or build new data flows. Only by understanding all the processes from the stakeholder's point of view, can a bespoke solution be designed to satisfy and enhance the client's business model. A full-service offering With the requirements defined, the focus then shifts to the resourcing of the various components. It is essential that the TPA is able to provide the client with access to a broad range of service offerings. At Kane, these services include:
It is also important that such services are provided via a secure, enterprise-class policy administration system. At Kane, security is built in at all levels - physical datacentre security, 100% redundant primary site, full functionality DR site, and daily backups are but some of the security measures we have in place. Embracing change We acknowledge and embrace the fact that over time your business needs change. Offering total flexibility, coupled with our global reach and market-leading LPI expertise, we ensure our clients are confident in the knowledge that they are with a partner that can meet their needs today and well into the future. Furthermore, our experience encompasses large migrations, while our international platform enables us to get feet on the ground to assist start-ups in bringing products to market. At Kane LPI, flexibility is at the core of what we do. John Uprichard, Head of Life, Pension and Investments Nar Almeida, Head of Sales and Marketing |
