Met Life Case Study
Since in a mutual many the policy holders are the “owners” of the company and in a stock company the stockholders constitute the owners, MET was obliged to issue stock to all its policy holders, based on the total worth of their policies held by MET.
This needed to be accomplished prior to going public and opening the opportunity to other non-policy- holding investors who wished to buy MET shares. To that end, MET needed to locate information on each and every policy owned by its clients, determine the collective value of said policies, and to then provide these policy owners with equivalently valued stock certificates. Fortunately, each major Midlife and NEFF insurance product’s data was stored within its own information system and the only way to establish such a list of policy holders and the relative worth of their polices would be to extract the policy ownership data from each system and then to merge this data into a common master database. This was a very complicated and difficult task. First of all, the policy-based Information systems at both Midlife and NEFF were numerous and very different from one another.
Second, while each insurance system may have had its own standard for capturing client information, there was no established standard among systems for said data collection. Some of these systems were very old and developed to meet specific business unit needs, while others reflected more current data management standards. Even such a thing as a unique client identification number did not exist prior to Meet’s move to a stock company. Third, in many instances those employees who worked on and understood the data structures in the older systems, were dead, retired, or no longer employed by Midlife.
Lastly, the data about individual policy holders themselves naturally changed over time as clients relocated, married, changed careers, and so forth.
Case Questions: 1. What Internal challenges do you foresee In bringing this data together in a single, integrated database? They will have to extract the policy ownership information from each system and then to merge this data into a common master database and the policy Dates International systems are Deterrent Trot can toner. I nerve Is no established standard among systems for data collection.
The employees who worked and understood the data structures in the old systems are now dead, retired or no longer work in Met Life. The data of the policy holders change over time they relocate get married or change professions.
Differences in hardware, combining Moieties’ software’ with New England financial’. No established standards. Need to hire or train people with older systems. 2. What differences might exist in the management of data from one insurance product system to another? Different storage system for information.
Formatted differently so would need data to be converted to other names or ways.
METS product line included casualty (Auto and Home) insurance as well as various life insurance products ( Term life, Whole life and annuities). Whereas NEFF’S product line included life insurance and wealth offerings. The average net Roth of Met life’s customers is about dollars and of NEFF’S is about 10 times of that. The average life policy sold by MET was a term policy of a face value of 50,000 dollars whereas NEFF’S was about to one million dollars. . What issues might exist in a) matching the ownership of different policies owned by the same client and b) determining the total worth of all a client’s policies held at MET? [list] The data of the individual policy holders themselves change naturally over time as clients relocate, get married or change their careers.
Even the unique client identification number did not exist prior to Meet’s move to a stock company. This makes it even more difficult for matching the ownership of different policies owned by the same person. B.
Have to factor in when the customer bought their policy and if what each policy is worth. 4.
Will MET find it difficult to achieve the standardization of data and data management policies required of the master policy holder database system? [explicit Yes/No, and then explain via table] No, It will be easier for them to find out the policy information of the customers, as the records of all customers will be kept in one database, as compared to individual policy databases where everything would be kept in a separate database
