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Customer Access Accounts (CAAs)*

With the coming of age of baby boomers, the life insurance industry is preparing to distribute benefits to thousands of claimants. Whether the payouts are in the form of lump sums or repetitive arrangements, millions of investment dollars are at stake. So imagine if you—the insurer—could reduce the outflow of cash, retain investment income, disburse benefits and pay competitive interest rates to accountholders, while at the same time providing a valuable service? You can do all of this and more through Customer Access Accounts (CAA), easy-to-implement solutions that meet your needs and the needs of the beneficiary.

A Checkbook Instead of a Check
Leading life and property/casualty insurers have found that offering personalized accounts as alternatives to one-time and recurring settlements helps their bottom lines by:

• Fostering ongoing customer relationships with beneficiaries and claimants, and
• Earning investment income on funds that otherwise would have been lost to another financial services firm.

Open Solutions' turnkey asset retention solution leverages its traditional banking platform to provide the back-office processing and customer service required to support these accountholder relationships.

Through the Eyes of Beneficiaries and Claimants
Many times, the recipient of a lump sum settlement has recently experienced distress—the death of a loved one, catastrophic property damage, a prolonged settlement process, or financial difficulties.

Distributing a checkbook to beneficiaries or claimants, rather than a corporate check, allows them to defer making decisions during a difficult time. Upon receipt, accountholders can immediately write checks for any or all of the proceeds. They can comfortably take time to make critical financial decisions while earning a competitive rate of interest beginning the day the account is opened. Accountholders have the security of a safe investment vehicle and complete control of the proceeds.

Raising CAA Programs to New Levels
Today, insurers are using CAAs as the preferred conduit for distribution of claim proceeds. CAAs are the predominant method for paying individual death benefits, and quickly becoming the preferred payment method for group life claims. Open Solutions clients use CAAs for:

Repetitive Payments. Insurers are using CAAs to achieve the benefits of fund retention, cost reduction, and extended customer relationships with repetitive payments, including annuity payments, required minimum distributions (RMDs), and other repetitive payments. When recipients are provided with a checkbook, funds are credited to their retained asset accounts on the due date and they begin to earn interest at once. Recipients can immediately write checks for any or all of the funds, and your organization no longer has to issue checks or deal with lost, returned, or stopped checks.

Cash Surrenders. When a policyholder requests a cash surrender, you don't have to cross the relationship off your books. Supplying a checkbook as an automatic feature of cash surrender processing allows your organization to retain funds until needed by the policyholder. Additionally, this account preserves the relationship, giving you the opportunity to sell alternative products and services.

Research shows that many of those who surrender their policies do not have an immediate need for all of the proceeds. Policyholders quickly understand the benefit of maintaining funds in an interest-bearing account that offers check-writing privileges. Your organization can maintain these existing customer relationships, which otherwise would have terminated once the policies were surrendered and the checks mailed.

CAAs can also be used to disburse structured settlement proceeds, property/casualty claims, agent commissions, and policy loans.

Today, Open Solutions' Customer Access Accounts (CAAs) enable more than 120 major insurance carriers to retain more than $9 billion in assets through approximately 325,000 active accounts.

*Customer Access Account (CAA) was previously named Retained Asset Account (RAA)