Feature

How MetLife Met the Integration Challenge

Saddled with numerous disparate systems after an aggressive acquisition binge, MetLife needed to get integrated to cash in on its size and improve customer service. Here's how it did it.

August 15, 2002 — CIO —

The austere bell-and-clock tower in which MetLife makes its home in Manhattan has been dwarfed by other skyscrapers since its completion in 1909, but it remains a monument in the Madison Square Park area. It looms as a symbol of the nation’s second largest insurer, with $2.1 trillion worth of insurance in force.

Last year, the MetLife companies served 9 million U.S. households, 4.1 million customers abroad, and 64,000 companies and institutions. It has 46,154 employees, and last year it amassed $32.5 billion in operating revenue. On the technology front, the company has five CIOs, one CTO and an executive vice president of technology who oversees them all. During its 134-year history, CIO-100 honoree MetLife has grown not only in size but also in complexity, becoming so broad that Chuck Johnston, vice president of insurance information strategies at Stamford, Conn.-based Meta Group, describes it as the "GE of the insurance industry."

Much of MetLife’s scale is the result of its aggressive acquisition strategy -- it has bought everything from billion-dollar enterprises to distribution channels across all its lines of business. Because of its rapid expansion, MetLife was saddled with a plethora of disparate systems and processes -- in addition to its own legacy systems, some already decades old. In 1998, a new CEO, Robert H. Benmosche, came on board looking to transform the company’s reputation as a staid insurance company to that of a nimble, full-service financial services firm. To that end, he had MetLife look at its millions of customers from an enterprisewide perspective and start taking advantage of its enormity to cut expenses. At the same time, MetLife executives decided to take the company public, meaning it needed to respond to public-reporting requirements dictated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. All these changes meant one thing for MetLife’s technology team -- it was time to get integrated.

Daniel J. Cavanagh knew big changes were ahead when he took over as executive vice president in charge of operations and information technology in March 1999. Appointed by Benmosche, he was given a $990 million budget. "We knew we were going public in a year. And we knew we were doing it very rapidly," Cavanagh says. "So no one was taken by surprise."

The message from "the chairman," as most of the IT execs call Benmosche, was that the IT staffs supporting MetLife’s business units needed to rein in the subsidiaries so that the huge insurer could start reaping economies of scale. "When MetLife started testing its value proposition with the Street, the big sentiment was that it’s time to harvest some of that scale you’ve got," says Tony Candito, senior vice president and CIO of MetLife’s individual business unit. "At that point, everything changed."