Canadian insurer Western Life Assurance Company wasn't looking for too much from a software solution, just a simpler business process for underwriting life insurance policies, according to Bruce Ratzlaff, CEO. "Typically with the smaller-size policies, for the money you get, the traditional processes were just too long, complicated, onerous, and expensive," he says. "That was the core issue for us."

When Western Life began the process of finding a technology solution for its problems, the carrier was unsure where the process would lead. Ratzlaff gathered a group of creative people who were charged with finding a way to do things differently and better. "Over the course of a year, we got the right people involved, were able to dispose of some old paradigms, and invented a new approach to [e-commerce]," he says. Ratzlaff was pleased with what developed because, as he puts it, "typically the life insurance industry isn't particularly creative."

It was essential the new system operate in real time, be electronic, and be accessible to the Web, Ratzlaff explains. "We didn't want to have resident software we were going to have to distribute and maintain," he says.