A lot has been said and written about the political and economic situation in Europe. Interesting news came from Oslo last week with the Nobel Committee awarding the Peace Nobel Prize to the European Union. While I reckon that some may be right to believe that the 70-year period of peaceful time we have been [...]

Let’s play Jeopardy together! If the most frequently given answer from a panel of insurance customers is “Don’t know,” what was the question? It was: “Which UK insurer do you think is the most innovative?” For those who think that is an exaggeration of the common opinion that the insurance industry is not innovative at [...]

My colleagues Craig Beattie and Catherine Stagg-Macey published an interesting report back in April about the change in behaviour of online shoppers when looking for car insurance policy online in the UK. The title of the report is The Customer, Google, and UK Car Insurance: Lessons from Evolving Customer Search Behavior. In summary this study [...]

I have frequently provided my personal view in this forum about the economic situation insurance companies have been facing since the emergence of the financial crisis back in the end of 2007. I published a post in November last year titled “Time is passing, uncertainty remains“, in which I exposed my view on 3 important [...]

Some insurers are starting to launch e-reputation insurance products for individuals. Indeed, in France Swiss Life started to launch last year an insurance product targeting students about to start a professional career or any persons worrying about all data and information about them on the web. Very recently Axa France also launched a similar insurance [...]

My colleague Jamie Macgregor and I have published the Celent’s regular report profiling policy administration system (PAS) vendors in the life and pension space in Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA) back in November 2011. This report profiles 34 systems offered to EMEA insurers on the market. Beside this research we thought it would be [...]

The insurance industry is not immune from changes occurring at the marcroeconomic level. Based on our frequent and periodic discussions with European CIOs we have noticed that the level of uncertainty prevailing in the economy right now has contributed to reduce IT budgets (for more about this, read the following reports from Celent: Insurance in [...]

Getting back to December 2008, I wrote a blog post mentioning that Solvency II was under threat and that we could expect some more delays of its effective implementation. Last week the FSA in the UK announced that it is likely that the effective date of the new regulation implementation will have to be delayed [...]

Celent will publish soon a research updating a report published in 2007: The Build vs. Buy Debate. This report will draw the result of a survey we launched earlier this year in order to gather a perspective from insurers regarding the build or buy question for different types of system and components, that cover the [...]

Yesterday’s announcement by IBM, to acquire Algorithmics demonstrates the trend towards more concentration on the risk management vendor market. Algorithmics has been a successful IT vendor for many years taking advantage of new regulations such as Basel II and Solvency II to gain traction within the financial industry and IBM remains an IT infrastructure and [...]