Consis International and the art of changing an insurer one piece at a time

An insurance core can do its job and still be the problem. It issues the policy. It collects the premium. It records the claim. Then someone asks for a new product, a new distribution partner or a different underwriting rule, and the apparently healthy system becomes a queue. Nothing has crashed. The business has simply arrived at the limits of what its machinery can change.

This is the territory occupied by Consis International. Its work happens behind the quote screen, the broker’s portal and the reassuring message that a claim has been received. The company makes the systems that turn those gestures into an operation. Its most interesting proposition is a practical one: parts of that operation can be modernized while the existing core keeps working.

The system that works too slowly

Consis builds Acsel Suite, a family of insurance applications with a configurable core at its center. Product definitions, quoting, underwriting, issuance, billing and collections sit in the same broad architecture as claims, commissions and reinsurance. Those connections matter because a change to an insurance product has consequences long after the sales team has finished admiring it.

The company says Acsel Factory, Mobile, Claims and Reinsurance can integrate with a legacy core. An insurer could therefore begin with product configuration or claims handling rather than undertake the whole replacement at once. This creates a useful distinction between the destination and the first purchase. The destination may be a different core. The first purchase may be relief from one expensive delay.

In its August 2026 discussion of modernization, Consis treats both complete replacement and progressive integration as valid choices. A pervasive structural problem can justify a broad transition. A concentrated bottleneck can justify a narrower start. That is a more useful sales conversation than assuming that every old system has committed the same offense.

A policy is a chain of obligations

Take health insurance. A plan needs more than a name and a premium. Acsel’s health capabilities cover provider networks, deductibles, waiting periods, benefit limits, authorizations and reimbursement. Fee schedules and agreements with medical providers introduce another set of conditions. A claim is where all those conditions stop being product descriptions and start determining amounts.

Property and casualty brings its own inventory of details. Consis describes support for inspections, appraisals, reserves, supplier payments and recoveries. Life and personal accident products add individual and group administration. Credit protection connects insurance to lending. The common requirement is software that can carry the product’s rules through the operational chain without losing their meaning.

Acsel Factory is the company’s answer to product configuration. Consis presents it as a way to define products and business rules without changing source code. The business appeal is easy to understand: a coverage adjustment should not automatically become a new custom development project. Configuration gives the insurer a place to express a rule and reuse the components around it.

Reinsurance is the particularly revealing part of the suite. An insurer may transfer part of its risk, but the original policy and subsequent claim still change. Acsel Reinsurance connects contracts and accounting to that activity. Consis’s September 2026 article argues that separate spreadsheets and reconciliations can leave the insurer with a fragmented view. The elegant customer interface is little consolation if the financial back office must reconstruct the transaction afterward.

The people who know the exceptions

Consis dates its founding to 1987. An Oracle customer account traces its origins to Venezuela and its subsequent Florida base. That history puts the company in a different position from a new entrant arriving with a single digital distribution tool: it has worked through successive versions of the insurance industry’s operational software.

The company identifies three co-founders in its leadership: president Oscar Carrera, executive vice president Germán Marcano and chief technology officer Miguel Cerra. Carrera’s background includes a CIO role; Marcano’s includes engineering and business administration; Cerra leads the product lifecycle. The leadership biographies describe a combination of insurance operations, implementation and software engineering.

Its services give that experience somewhere to go. Consis offers business consulting, implementation management through a project office, training and continuing support. Its stated implementation methodology draws on PMBOK standards. Consis University provides functional, technical and operational education. These are the less photogenic parts of a software purchase, but they determine whether the people using it understand the rules they have been given permission to change.

The customer behind the customer

The paying customer is an insurance organization. Policyholders, agents and service providers encounter the result through the insurer’s processes and channels. Consis therefore sits in the business-to-business infrastructure market: it equips the carrier rather than selling the consumer a policy of its own.

The current website describes roughly 100 insurance companies and a presence across more than 18 countries. Celent’s July 2023 Latin American life policy-administration report names RIMAC Peru, HSBC Mexico and AXA Brazil as notable clients. Those historical references locate Consis among established insurers, where a core-system decision must accommodate an existing operation.

Its regional positioning makes multi-language, multi-currency and multi-company support more than decorative specifications. Acsel is built to handle those dimensions. Alternatives in the same Celent market survey include Sapiens, Fadata, Equisoft, Sistran and TCS. Consis’s case rests on the fit between insurance-specific functionality, regional experience and the possibility of a staged transition. A procurement team still has to judge that fit against its own products and countries.

The work also extends through partners. A March 2025 announcement described an expanded Blackfin Corp collaboration covering Acsel functionality and scalability in Latin America, Mexico and Spain. Blackfin had already worked on maintenance of Consis products. The expansion illustrates how the surrounding implementation and support capability becomes part of the proposition.

The price of changing the machinery

A public procurement record gives a rare glimpse of the commercial shape. On May 20, 2025, Costa Rica’s INS board awarded a core-insurance procurement to a consortium of six GBM entities and Consis International LC. Its scope includes analysis, design, implementation, data migration, production operation and subsequent support.

The published notice lists that one-time line at $3,312,299.96 excluding VAT. It also describes subscriptions, cloud services and demand-based work, with a 48-month contract period beginning after the start order. This is a consortium price for a particular scope, rather than a price tag for Acsel or a measure of Consis’s revenue. It shows why buying a core is buying a transition as well as software.

Infrastructure economics have mattered to Consis for years. Oracle’s 2014 account describes deploying Exadata and Exalogic to improve performance and reduce total cost of ownership. The stated aim was to offer competitive software while keeping the underlying platform current.

“a platform that’s always up to date”

Michael Cerra, CTO / Oracle customer account, 2014

Choose the first piece carefully

The useful lesson is to specify the delay before specifying the replacement. Is the problem launching products, handling claims, adding distribution or reconciling reinsurance? Consis’s modular proposition makes those separate questions commercially actionable. A buyer can ask to see one changed rule travel from configuration through the relevant transaction, rather than settle for a tour of attractive screens.

Progressive integration depends on the systems being able to exchange reliable information and on teams knowing which application owns each process. It cannot by itself cure every structural limitation. Consis’s own modernization discussion makes room for full replacement when constraints affect the operation broadly, and emphasizes migration, integrations and user adoption in that transition.

For a reader outside insurance, the transferable idea is refreshingly ordinary: a working system may have become a slow system, and the sensible first change depends on where the delay lives. Consis has made a business of the insurance version of that problem. The policy keeps moving. The machinery underneath gets another chance to catch up.