Highlights from the 2021 TAI User Group Conference

By Tom Freitas | May 28, 2021

The life insurance industry, like the rest of the world, has changed since we last met in Miami two years ago for the 2019 TAI User Group. Together with our clients, we responded to the many challenges brought on by the pandemic to keep business moving forward.

While navigating changes, the TAI team also used this time to focus on our strategic offerings. The 2021 TAI User Group Conference gave us the chance to share updates on the exciting technology products we’ve been working on and to virtually reconnect with our clients across the globe.

TAI 4.0: Say Goodbye to COBOL

On Day 1, Pete Murphy, Chief Architect, and Eric Seitz, Senior Software Developer, gave us a look at the history of TAI’s reinsurance administration system through the years. To make a long-but-entertaining story short, with the release of TAI 4.0, we will finally be leaving COBOL behind.

This change delivers significant enhancements to the user experience and functionality in the life reinsurance administration system. Some of the new features highlighted in the session include:

  • Modernized user interface for a richer, more satisfactory user experience
  • Improved architecture for greater scalability and easier integrations via APIs
  • Easier, faster database queries
  • Enhancements to enable cloud deployments
  • Data protection enhancements, such as role-based security features
  • Greater support for international markets

Log in to the TAI Help Desk to watch the recorded session.

The TAI 4.0 team is wrapping up the Beta testing phase and moving on to live environment testing with a hand-selected group of early adopters. The current expectation is that TAI 4.0 will be rolled out to all qualifying upgrade customers in the last quarter of this year through early 2022. Contact Nicole Karfakis regarding questions about your upgrade path.

New TAI Treaty Tool Leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to Address a Perennial Insurance Issue

Many insurers have filing cabinets filled with insurance treaties, some of them dating back decades. Finding the one piece of information you need can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. This is especially true if the data isn’t even in the treaty itself but in supporting documentation, such as an email or transcript.

On Day 2 of the conference, Kathleen Kelly, Director of Reinsurance Service, and Brittainy Rivers, AVP of Consulting Services, gave a short demo of the TAI Treaty solution. This tool helps insurers in two primary ways. First, it allows them to digitize treaties for easier access. Second, it leverages AI and ML to make finding needed information easier through better treaty classification, field-level access, and advanced queries.

The Treaty tool team expects to launch this product in June 2021. Watch the session on the Help Desk to learn more and sign up to be notified of the launch here.

An Industry-First Approach to Avoiding Jumbo Violations

A Jumbo policy is a life insurance policy on an individual that is so large that it exceeds an insurer’s ability/willingness to accept the risk. Reinsurers can insure the carrier against that risk, but they will typically set limits on allowable coverage across policies. Unfortunately, there isn’t a foolproof way of knowing how much coverage an individual has across policies, so Jumbo violations can be a concern.

On Day 3, Todd Seabaugh,​ VP of Business Initiatives for RGAX, and Trey Reynolds​, EVP of Strategy and New Business Development​ for MIB, shared more details on the work being done to help carriers address this challenge.

TAI has partnered with the Medical Information Bureau (MIB), a platform-agnostic resource many insurers already trust for underwriting data, to resolve this long-standing industry challenge. Our role is to aggregate, extract, and send data to MIB. Once received, MIB houses this data, resulting in a secured industry data vault, which can then be leveraged by participating carriers to:

  • Identify whether a new policy will push an applicant over Jumbo limits
  • Determine if a new policy will grossly over-insure an individual
  • Provide useful insights through the coordination of claims information. 

Thank you! 

The highlights I shared in this post focus on the new and updated technologies TAI is developing to support digital transformation in the life insurance industry. But TAI isn’t only about technology. The TAI User Group also offered opportunities to hear from reinsurers, as they shared their challenges from the past year and plans for the months ahead. In my next post, I will share my takeaways from the Reinsurers Panel on COVID-19 Impacts and Reinsurance Trends.

In the meantime, my heartfelt thanks to everyone who made our first-ever virtual TAI User conference a success. Of course, this includes our event planning and technical teams, as well as all the developers, product managers, and subject matter experts who devoted so many hours of their time to pull off a virtual industry conference for the first time. But more than anything, our thanks go out to the more than 300 users who attended sessions from around the world. Seeing so many of you online and engaged made all the hard work worth every moment.