Celent conducted another successful Peer Networking Event (PNE), this time in Atlanta, Georgia. The event was well attended by insurers from around the area and even had representation from a bank. The PNEs are designed to bring together insurers to discuss topics that they find of interest, either due to immediate concerns or future direction. [...]

Insurance has traditionally been known as a risk-adverse industry and thus the last to employ new technologies. This characteristic is more a comment on the old culture and way of doing business than really being risk adverse. Customers are now forcing insurers to deal with a change at a rate that is faster than they [...]

I was recently talking to a past colleague over lunch and he reminded me of a concern I had a couple of years ago that seems to be descending on insurers in the next 2-5 years. Architects are usually considered valuable internal resources within carriers (for good reason if they are good) along with PMs [...]

Insurance companies have always been risk averse to quickly adopting new technologies. It is not uncommon for technologies to be mature in other industries and still be low on the adoption scale within insurers. However, as the rate of change has rapidly accelerated over the last decade, carriers are in the uncomfortable position of having [...]

Every now and then a strategic alliance occurs that makes a lot of sense. Today, McCamish Systems, an InfoSys BPO company, and Pegasystems announced a strategic partnership that will leverage the best of both their solutions, namely, McCamish’s VPAS Life and Pegasystem’s BPM technology. (See http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20111207005172/en/McCamish-Systems-Infosys-BPO-Company-Announces-Strategic for full announcement.) McCamish VPAS Life is a policy [...]

I find it somewhat amusing and somewhat frustrating that insurers are still trying to solve their business problems with new technologies using antiquated methods. It is analogous to trying to use a 1950’s football strategy of just giving it to the running back and banging it up field. They seem to assume that because the [...]

At my prior position, I worked with a lot of vendors and their product teams. We were usually on the leading edge of SOA development and strategy and one of the most common requests I had of the vendors was, “can you just bring together some other insurance clients so we can talk without you?”. [...]

Insurance carriers are inundated with data. Data from their policy admin systems, financial systems, CRM systems, claims systems, etc. Because most carrier’s IT systems grew up in siloed business units, there was little to no sharing of data across departments. Business would ask IT to provide enterprise views, but IT would come back with very [...]

A lot has been made about Cloud computing recently; even to the point of asking if it is more fog than cloud. The focus of these discussions is strictly on the technology which is where they miss the point. It is reminiscent of the early SOA discussions. Celent defines Cloud computing as the use of [...]

During a recent interview with a senior level leader within a large P&C insurer responsible for their outsourcing efforts, he made the comment that they plan to increase their use of BPO and explore SaaS solutions. However, he then went on to state that the biggest hurdle that they face in using SaaS is they [...]