Allstate Uses Web Services to Quickly Create Insurance ...



Overview

Country or Region: United States

Industry: Financial services

Customer Profile

Based in Northbrook, Illinois, Allstate Corporation is one of the nation’s largest insurers. In 2003, the company recorded roughly U.S.$32.1 billion in revenue.

Business Situation

Allstate wanted to give customers access to life and annuity policies through its customer-facing Web portal. Such functionality already was available through another Web portal restricted to financial representatives.

Solution

Allstate used Web Services Enhancements version 2.0 for Microsoft® .NET to reuse its existing technology, providing access to customers and creating a security Web service available across the enterprise.

Benefits

■ Popular new feature quickly adopted

■ Reusing resources saves millions

■ New opportunities opened by service-oriented architecture

■ Development costs 50 percent less than projected

■ High-grade security extended easily

| | |“This project opened doors for us. With Web services, we can develop technology that is reusable not only within an application but also across the enterprise.”

Clark Sell, Lead Developer, Allstate Financial Technology

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| | | |Customers of Allstate Corporation, one of the largest insurance companies in the United States, can |

| | | |manage their property and vehicle policies through the company’s consumer Web portal, the |

| | | | Customer Care Center. To also provide customers with access to their life and annuity |

| | | |insurance policies, Allstate took advantage of an existing Web portal——that enabled|

| | | |financial representatives to manage those policies. Allstate used Web Services Enhancements version |

| | | |2.0 for Microsoft® .NET to enable customers to access policies managed through |

| | | |while remaining within the familiar Customer Care Center user interface. Allstate built the new |

| | | |feature in two months, saved millions by extending an application instead of duplicating it, and |

| | | |created the foundation for a service-oriented architecture that will accelerate future integration |

| | | |projects. |

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| | | |[pic] |

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Situation

Allstate Corporation is one of the largest publicly held personal lines insurers in the United States. Its Allstate Financial division encompasses the businesses that provide life insurance, annuity, and retirement products. In 2002, the technical group at Allstate Financial, Allstate Financial Technology, built , a Web portal that provides financial representatives with access to the company’s five insurance policy management systems. The representatives can access policy and product information online, download forms and documents, and manage their clients’ accounts—all tasks that previously required telephone conversations through an Allstate call center.

The portal is popular with the independent registered representatives who sell the company’s financial products, and the portal is recognized by many in the financial industry as a breakthrough application. The portal made a “stunning debut” according to DALBAR, a leading financial-services market research firm that rated the Web site number one for financial professionals in the fourth quarter of 2002. Since then, the portal has maintained top-10 ratings from DALBAR, which evaluates mutual fund and life insurance/annuity Web sites by function, usability, content currency, and consistency.

Soon after the project was completed, the organization that managed the Customer Care Center approached Allstate Financial Technology to find out more about the project’s development process. At the time, customers could access their vehicle and property insurance policies through the Customer Care Center, but they could not access life and annuity policies that they had purchased through their Allstate agent. The Customer Care group wanted to provide customers with access to this information through the Customer Care Center—a simple concept that turned out to be not so simple to execute.

Having just completed the project for one division, Allstate didn’t want to re-create the same functionality for the Customer Care Center. But the company couldn’t simply open up the site to customers either. The portal had been built specifically for financial representatives, with independent user authentication, identity management procedures, and a user interface targeted at producers.

“The portal provided the features that Customer Care Center wanted, but it wasn’t consumer oriented,” explains Kevin Rice, Enterprise Architect for Allstate. “Meanwhile, we had a look and feel for our policyholders within the Customer Care Center that has been very successful.”

Allstate wanted to integrate the functionality of its portal with the user interface of its Customer Care Center. But in doing so, the company faced several challenges. First, any new features would have to be accessible through the Customer Care Center interface so that customers would not be confused. Second, the company needed to sign in customers to two distinct systems while requiring only a single user name and password. Finally, Allstate would have to secure any connection between the two Web applications so that they could exchange the information necessary to maintain the illusion of a single session—while providing a high level of data privacy.

Solution

Allstate came up with a two-part response to the challenges. The company re-created the Customer Care Center user experience on and then used Web Services Enhancements (WSE) version 2.0 for Microsoft® .NET to securely and seamlessly pass customer data and logon information between the two applications. WSE simplifies the development and deployment of Web services, and is a free, fully supported add-in to the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 development system and the Microsoft .NET Framework. The .NET Framework is an integral component of the Microsoft Windows® operating system, providing a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications.

Today, when customers sign in to the Customer Care Center at , they can register all the policies that they have purchased through Allstate, including their life insurance and annuity policies. After the policies have been registered, the customer can perform several self-service actions. When customers want to manage these policies, they can click a link that presents them with a series of options—just as if they had accessed an auto or homeowner policy.

From the customer’s perspective, it appears that has simply added more functions to the Customer Care Center. The reality is that the customer has been passed from the Customer Care Center and automatically signed in to the site. Recognizing that the user is a customer and not a financial representative, then presents information using the look and feel of the Customer Care Center. Finally, when the customer requests a service not provided by , the site passes the customer back to the Customer Care Center and restarts the user’s session there.

Behind the scenes, Allstate uses Web services to provide customers with a seamless experience. When the customer clicks a link to access a life or annuity policy, the Customer Care Center application makes a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) call to a Web service developed using Visual Studio .NET 2003 and hosted by the application. The Web service, built by Allstate with WSE, follows the Web Services Security (WS-Security) protocol to provide a security token to the Customer Care Center application. The Customer Care Center application then redirects the customer and the security token to the application. When the application receives the service request from the user’s browser, it uses the security token to identify the user as an authenticated customer and seamlessly signs in the customer to the system. (See Figure 1.)

Given that the customer now is accessing a different Web portal, a perceptive user might notice that the address in the Web browser has changed. However, that would be the only clue to the switch; replicates the Customer Care Center interface for customers transferred from there.

The Customer Care Center uses Microsoft server controls to customize the Web page header, footer, left navigation bar, navigational drop-down menus, and menu items based on a customer’s profile. , part of the .NET Framework, is a set of technologies for creating dynamic Web applications.

The Customer Care Center group was able to quickly tailor the server controls and deploy them on the Web servers. Thus, customers experience a consistent Customer Care Center look and feel while visiting the site. “With Microsoft technology, we’re able to provide a seamless interface to the customer while maintaining a single source code base,” says Mark Smith, Lead Developer, Internet Channel Technology at Allstate. “As we continue enhancing the look and feel of the Customer Care Center, we can transfer those changes to the Web site with minimal effort.”

When a user has completed his or her activities, or requests a different service, the application reverses the transfer process. The application calls the security Web service, obtains a security token, and redirects the customer back to the Customer Care Center, where the session continues as if the user had never left.

Benefits

By linking with the Customer Care Center, Allstate is able to provide significant new functionality to its customers. Allstate used Web Services Enhancements to integrate two independent systems under a seamless interface, while maintaining high levels of data security with minimal effort, reusing existing application infrastructure, and delivering the solution in half the time and at half the cost originally projected.

While began its life as a Web application targeted at financial representatives, it has since grown into a reusable resource available across departmental lines at Allstate. The project has also become a proving ground for some of the company’s first steps toward a service-oriented architecture. Allstate expects that the experience will pay off in decreased development times on future integration projects.

New Feature Quickly Adopted by Customers

Allstate not only improved its customer service but also preserved its investment in existing business processes. Using Web services to make two portals built on different software architectures appear to customers as if they were a single system, Allstate has added a capability for its customers that didn’t previously exist—one that closes a logical gap in service. Only eight months after Allstate launched the new functionality, approximately 25 percent of eligible life and annuity policies had been registered with the Customer Care Center.

The portal is reporting more than 5,500 visits per month originating from the Customer Care Center. “The strong adoption rate is an early indicator that customers want online access to their policies,” says Rice. “We’re pleased with the outcome of this project.”

has continued to garner industry recognition. In the fourth quarter of 2004, the Web site received the number-one overall ranking in the Watchfire GomezPro Scorecard survey of insurance carrier Web sites.

Multimillion-Dollar Savings from Resource Reuse

Allstate was able to save time and money by extending an existing system in ways not originally planned for. The portal was a multimillion-dollar project that took 25 developers seven months to complete. The site was built exclusively for financial representatives, and the user experience was geared toward that group of users.

Without Web services, if Allstate wanted to give customers access to policies maintained by Allstate Financial, the company would have had to either route customers to a second Web site or add that functionality to the Customer Care Center. The first solution would have forced customers to take extra steps to obtain their policy information, while the second could have involved replicating the functionality of within the Customer Care Center—a huge undertaking. “We would have had to build the presentation logic from scratch,” says Clark Sell, Lead Developer for Allstate Financial Technology.

Instead, by using Web services, five developers were able to complete the portal integration project in two months. “We were able to reuse what we’d already built,” says Sell. “The difference was like night and day.”

Allstate plans to build on the gains made from the project to continue to roll out Web services across the company. Already, the Web services designed for the portal integration have been added to the Allstate Enterprise Reference Architecture, a code framework that internal developers can use to jump-start projects. Allstate expects the components to contribute to shorter development cycles with future projects, and open up new projects that previously might have been considered to costly to contemplate. Developers at Allstate also are taking advantage of the security Web service hosted by Allstate Financial Technology to provide security for their own applications.

“We now have other areas in Allstate building Web portals on top of their existing systems,” says Sell. “With our Web service architecture built on WSE, those areas can easily create secured Web services with just a few lines of code. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

New Opportunities from Service-Oriented Architecture

Integrating with the Customer Care Center will have a broader impact at Allstate beyond the immediate cost savings. Enabling and the Customer Care Center to work together while maintaining them as autonomous applications linked by Web services advances Allstate toward its strategic goal of a service-oriented architecture. “This project opened doors for us,” says Sell. “With Web services, we can develop technology that is reusable not only within an application but also across the enterprise.”

By using Web services to integrate the two applications, Allstate has established as a reusable component of the enterprise application architecture. “We wanted to keep our systems decoupled, and Web services enabled us to do that,” says Sell. “Now we are ready to take it to the next level and continue to build out our service-oriented architecture.”

For Allstate, the next level is likely to be integration with more than 500 banks that currently sell Allstate products to their customers. Allstate is working to be prepared to offer services so that a bank’s customers would be able to access their accounts on Allstate’s systems while remaining within the familiar interface of the bank from which they bought the financial products. “The banks can’t do this yet, but they will,” says Sell. “When they’re ready, we’ll have Web services built to expose the right functionality to them, and it won’t be difficult for us to do.”

Development Costs 50 Percent Lower Than Expected

Using Web services helped Allstate save development time and expense; the small group assigned to the project completed it in half the time originally anticipated and at half the projected cost. “In the past, integrating something like the Customer Care Center with would have been considered a big project, but with .NET software we got it done in two months,” says Rice.

The programming team came from the Allstate Financial Technology. Five developers were able to write the code for both the and Customer Care Center portals. When the Allstate Financial Technology developers handed off the code to the Customer Care Center developers, the customer portal group was able to quickly and easily implement the Web services provided.

Allstate cites the ability to customize available Web services instead of writing everything from scratch as the main reason for the small team size and rapid integration time. “Web Services Enhancements saved us a lot of time,” says Sell. “With the tools from Microsoft, we were able to build a really advanced security architecture using our in-house resources and expertise.”

Allstate also found that the quality of the .NET Framework Software Development Kit (SDK), and its level of integration with Visual Studio .NET 2003 accelerated the project development time and increased the stability of the final product. “The ability to use a new SDK and build something that goes live that quickly in a company of this size is impressive,” says Sell.

High Security with Low Effort

With the security tools provided by the .NET Framework, Allstate was able to maintain the high levels of data security already built into and to extend that security across the network to recognize customers being transferred from the Customer Care Center. “We built tough security into to protect our customers’ financial information,” says Rice. “Maintaining that level of security was critical.”

Independently developing the systems necessary to provide security for the data moving between the Customer Care Center and portals would have taken Allstate months. Instead, the company was able to use Web Services Enhancements to implement certificate-based security procedures. “Web Services Enhancements gave us the ability to provide a high level of security for our data pipeline without a lot of effort,” says Sell. “We laid out an entire infrastructure rapidly and successfully.”

The Allstate Financial Technology now is able to make a high-quality security infrastructure available as Web services to other groups, reducing development costs and increasing the level of data security across the company.

Microsoft .NET Software

Microsoft .NET is software that connects people, information, systems, and devices through the use of Web services. Web services are a combination of protocols that enable computers to work together by exchanging messages. Web services are based on the standard protocols of XML, SOAP, and WSDL, which allow them to interoperate across platforms and programming languages.

.NET is integrated across Microsoft products and services, providing the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, secure solutions with Web services. These solutions provide agile business integration and the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.

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This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

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Document published January 2005

| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003

■ Technologies

− Microsoft

− Microsoft .NET Framework

− Web Services Enhancements 2.0 for Microsoft .NET

|Hardware

■ Hewlett Packard ProLiant server computers | |

“Web Services Enhancements gave us the ability to provide a high level of security for our data pipeline without a lot of effort. We laid out an entire infrastructure rapidly and successfully.”

Clark Sell, Lead Developer, Allstate Financial Technology

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[pic]

Figure 1. When a customer needs to be transferred between the Customer Care Center and sites, the originating site requests a security token from the Web service application server and then refers the customer to the destination site. The destination site calls the Web service to validate the token and admits the customer.

“In the past, integrating something like the Customer Care Center with would have been considered a big project, but with .NET software we got it done in two months.”

Kevin Rice, Enterprise Architect, Allstate

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