Medibank’s investment in a new core policy management system, dubbed DelPHI, is starting to pay off, the health insurer said today.
“DelPHI is now embedded and we have successfully navigated through a rate change and tax statement cycle on the new platform without issue,” Medibank CEO Craig Drummond this morning told an investor briefing.
“DelPHI is enabling us to be more personalised and proactive in our interactions with customers, providing faster product development, greater ability to segment our customer base and improve our retention capability,” the CEO said.
The project involved replacing the ASX-listed health insurer’s customer, policy, premium and product management systems with a single, integrated commercial insurance software suite.
The new SAP-based platform, which was delivered by IBM, replaced a four-decade-old mainframe.
The move to the new system was not all smooth sailing, with Medibank in 2016 encountering some data migration problems.
Drummond said the DelPHI will help the company proactively match customers to the right level of cover, allowing it to carry out “proactive check-ins and personalised cover reviews”.
“To give you a sense of scale, we plan to have 250,000 proactive conversations with our customers this financial year, discussing their cover and reminding them about their loyalty bonuses and rewards,” the CEO said.
Medibank is also undertaking a $40 million project to implement a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, with the company spending $28 million on the initiative in FY17.
Medibank reported a group net profit after tax of $449.5 million for the full year, up 7.6 per cent from FY16.