Scott McKay, Genworth Financial

This is a mantra I voice regularly.

McKay, along with his global team of Genworth IT associates and contractors, has helped the company automate processes and consolidate systems. The company also relies heavily on process management capabilities such as Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing techniques.

Based in Richmond, Va., Genworth offers life, long-term-care, payment protection, retirement income, and investment products as well as mortgage insurance. It was spun off in May 2004 from GE Financial Services and included the companys principal U.S. life and mortgage insurance operations. With upward of $103 billion in assets, Gen-worth employs more than 6,000 people in 22 countries and serves 15 million customers worldwide.

McKay, who earned a B.S. in computer science from West Chester University, has worked in insurance his entire career. He began as a college intern for a major insurance carrier and then spent 10 years working as an IT consultant for a variety of companies, among them, United Pacific Life Insurance, where he was an officer and director of applications. After joining GE Financial in 1993, McKay served in various IT-related leadership capacities before becoming chief technology officer in the late 1990s. In 2003, he left the IT role to become senior vice president of operations, which also included the
companys quality organization. McKay added the CIO role to operations and quality in 2004 as part of a strategic initiative to combine the three areas under one Genworth umbrella.
Understanding the need to simplify and operate cost effectively is a prerequisite to automation. McKay and his team have spent several years consolidating dozens of administration systems that were byproducts of various acquisitions. Since the late 1990s, the team has decreased the number of systems from 38 to 14, with two more scheduled for consolidation during the next year.

In addition to increasing productivity and improving system capabilities, McKay says the companys integration efforts allow Genworth to reinvest the cost savings into strategic IT automation projects that can provide competitive advantage.
Those include Genworths proprietary GENIUS system, a J2EE platform that supports the new-business and underwriting process for term life insurance. In production since early 2004, the system has helped the company apply automation to approximately 45 percent of its underwriting cases and slash its cycle times in half.

This system has allowed us to unlock significant levels of additional productivity as well as create a service level thats significantly better than our competitors, McKay says.
Several years ago, Genworth began using grid computing to improve processing times in liability asset management processes. The company uses GridServer architecture from DataSynapse.

Grid computing allows us to run complex models in a matter of minutes or hours, rather than days, McKay says. The number of turns and different scenarios we can run has increased dramatically, which in turn improves product design, pricing, and risk management.

Originally deployed as a pilot proj-ect, grid computing has been so successful at Genworth the company now is using it on some operational systems.

As for future projects, McKay says voice technology offers tremendous opportunities. We have a process now where we use a voice signature that becomes, in essence, the authorization for taking certain actions, McKay notes. Were just at the tip of the iceberg, but as companies learn to use voice more effectively, the cost of voice transactions will go down and well see much-improved delivery of customer service.

As someone who likes to push the envelope with technology, it is no surprise McKay enjoys experimenting with prototypes for his own use. These include a variety of BlackBerrys, cell phones, and systems with wireless capabilities he uses in the office and on the road as well as sound technologies and theater systems when relaxing at home.

I have the patience to be an early adopter but also the experience to understand the immaturity of most of those technologies, he says, so I have reliable backup technology solutions for everything I personally try on a prototype basis.