The life and annuities business may be harder hit than P&C, owing to diminished consumer confidence in financial services industries. Despite these difficulties, life insurers still badly need strategic IT capabilities that, if anything, more important under current conditions. In difficult market conditions, competitive position becomes even more important, and insurers need IT improvements in order to compete in speed-to-market and service levels.

IT spending will be a critical factor for insurers wishing to both take advantage of these opportunities and address the inevitably heightened compliance and risk management concerns raised by the financial crisis.

"Cutting IT spending is not a viable option. There is too much risk in not updating infrastructure" adds Siva Kumaran.

Nishant Johri, country manager-China, FirstApex, said that "life insurers may hold IT spending relatively steady, despite economic turmoil. Operational effectiveness issues and support for growth strategies, especially in high growth market like China, should have a stronger impact on IT planning of life insurers than concern about the investment markets or the economic crisis will". FirstLife is a fifth generation Life Insurance Policy Administration System built on the Java platform."

"FirstLife addresses the current business needs of Life Insurers and offers the flexibility to be easily adapted in fast changing life Insurance landscape in Asia. A web based innovative solution like FirstLife can handle large policy volumes by easily addressing insurer's key challenges like time-to-market new products, functional and technological flexibility, distribution challenges, scalability issues, regulatory reporting and governance requirements, agency management issues, enterprise-level risk management, data security issues, accessibility, etc."

FirstApex; a provider of IT solutions for the insurance sector, launches policy administration system for life insurers – FirstLife recently. This was launched  during the 24th East Asian Insurance Congress 2008, being held in Hong Kong.