Business background
Norwich Union is the largest insurer in the UK. It is the leading long-term savings provider with a life market share of approximately 12% and more than 6 million customers. It is also the largest general insurer with an overall market share of 14% and 4.3 million customers. Norwich Union insures one in five households, one in seven motor vehicles and more than 800,000 businesses in the UK.
Norwich Union is part of Aviva, the world's sixth-largest insurance group1 which has £291 billion2 of assets under management. Aviva has 60,000 employees serving 30 million customers worldwide.
The payment processing requirement
Norwich Union sends over 100,000,000 BACS transmissions each year and has been using BACSTEL since the early 1990s. The organisation successfully migrated to the BACSTEL-IP platform in December 2005.
Prior to migration, Norwich Union had experienced problems with their incumbent BACS transmission system which was unreliable and prone to errors. Unimpressed by their current supplier and concerned to comply with the December 2005 migration deadline, the company sought a new systems provider. Specifically, they wanted to identify a payments solution that could:
- send large transmission files within a short processing time
- provide high levels of security
- fit with Norwich Union’s managed infrastructure
- send all types of BACS transaction codes
- receive all kinds of messaging reports in legacy format
- send internal reports by e-mail
- provide a robust Disaster Recovery solution
- be easily configured
From the outset, this project was extremely complicated due to the fragmented nature of the Norwich Union business and the fact that the company had just six weeks to implement a solution; this timescale included Hardware Security Modules.
1 Based on gross worldwide premiums.
2 Correct as at 30 June 2005
The Eiger Systems solution
Norwich Union knew of Eiger Systems through industry conferences and customer recommendations. Impressed by third party feedback and the speed of delivery offered by the company, Norwich Union chose Eiger System’s enterprise payments platform, EigerPAY Gateway.
To comply with industry regulations Norwich Union needed to implement EigerPAY Gateway quickly and cleanly within a complex hosting environment and without impacting on day-to-day business operations – an objective that was easily achieved.
The company also wanted to add value to their internal processes, many of which were being implemented overseas. Eiger Systems enabled Norwich Union to achieve this through EigerPAY Gateway’s highly configurable reports module which removed several of the company’s outdated processes.
“Eiger Systems stepped into the picture because we were unimpressed by other suppliers’ products and capabilities. They were able to deliver what they promised within the quoted timescales, first time and without incident. Considering the implementation was over six servers, each with Hardware Security Modules, this was impressive.
We found Eiger Systems very professional, well informed and approachable throughout the selection and implementation processes. The organisation’s consultants came on site and worked through our new end to end processes. This gave us every confidence in EigerPAY Gateway which continues to meet our needs and expectations.”
James Doherty
Service Development Manager