MetLife building big customer relational database

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By Lucas Mearian

(IDG) -- MetLife Inc. is building what will arguably become one of the largest real-time relational databases in the financial services industry by using middleware that will tie together silos of customer information through emerging XML standards. This effort will eventually support 100 million customers.

The price tag for the project, which includes the development of a database that will serve as a "gold copy" of customer information, is estimated by analysts to be more than $50 million.

The MetLife project is part of a bigger trend among insurance companies toward becoming full-service financial services organizations that can compete with banks and securities firms that have been offering similar products to consumers.

MetLife is using middleware to consolidate customer data from more than 30 business systems owned by companies that it has acquired during the past several years. Such an approach is cheaper than developing a new centralized database, and it allows a company to extend the life of its legacy computer systems, according to analysts.

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"It's a difference in philosophy of whether data should reside on common data structure or if you should just map to it where it already resides," said John Hagerty, an analyst at AMR Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.

MetLife CIO Tony Candito said the project, which was started more than a year ago, will allow the company to shift from an individual product or line-of-business model to an enterprise/customer focus. Though the gold copy database will be populated with new customer information that comes into the company, New York-based MetLife will eventually migrate legacy data into the system. The first phase is slated to go live in the first quarter of 2002, and the project is expected to continue into 2003.

"The reason we're doing this is because one of MetLife's greatest assets is its several data warehouses," including IBM DB2 databases, "but none of them were integrated," Candito said. "Having a holistic view of the customer provides to the service or [sales and] marketing organizations opportunities to recommend appropriate products to customers that they don't have that would better service their needs."

Chuck Johnston, an analyst at Meta Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn., said he has seen nearly a dozen Fortune 500 insurance companies take the middleware plunge during the past year, including Hartford Life Insurance Co. and Chubb & Co.

"MetLife is a mainframe-class IT shop, but you can't host this on a mainframe because there's not enough [CPU] availability," Johnston said. "Also, MetLife is in so many different businesses that there is no one application to manage all the policies that MetLife sells. Once you put this middleware layer in, it covers a number of applications," including systems used to support life insurance, mutual funds and annuities activities.

MetLife is using an IBM Shark storage system to store the gold copy of the customer data. The middleware system, which is being powered by an IBM RS/6000, is supplied by Toronto-based DWL Inc. Customer transactions from MetLife's back-end and customer relationship management systems will flow through DWL Customer software to provide a real-time copy of all customer information enterprisewide.

David Corrigan, product marketing manager for DWL Customer, said an XML interface based on the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development's (ACORD) emerging standard for life insurance will allow MetLife's systems to talk to one another.

"We have our own XML standard, and then one layer above that, we have a translation piece," Corrigan said. "For example, it can translate ACORD's [Life Data Model] standard. That way we can accept multiple industry standards and don't have to change our product."

Candito said the return on investment is "good enough" that CEO Robert Benmosche -- a former IT executive himself -- wants to continue with the project. Candito added that the ROI will be derived from "things like once-and-done servicing, the ability to consolidate statements ... and the ability to cross lines of businesses to generate [sales] leads."