P&C Insurance COTS Products:A study and market research on PAS

In the past decade, almost all the insurance carriers built their own systems for Policy Administration, Billing, Claims processing and other supporting systems. They also developed the interfaces to integrate these systems together. Developing and implementing their own IT system was their only choice at that time as there were no out-of-box products available in the market. But in today’s world, many Insurance COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) products are available for Policy Administration System (PAS) and the insurance carriers have more choices to choose from. While building an in-house customized system offers a greater level of flexibility to the businesses, the availability of attractive COTS products, in fact, makes the decision making harder.

While the debate on ‘Build’ vs. ‘Buy’ continues till date, in this paper, we’ll take a look at the need for ‘Build’ and ‘Buy’, understand COTS, identify few commercially available P&C COTS PAS products, gather information
from web and identify their features. The objective of the paper is to provide insight into COTS, PAS, making the ‘Build’ vs. ‘Buy’ decision and introduce some of the COTS products.