February 3rd, 2010 by Matthew Josefowicz
From my latest column in Insurance Networking News:
More than 40 years ago, Paul Newman’s prison guard in the film, “Cool Hand Luke,” made famous the phrase, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Yet, today, a quick Google search of the phrase will pull up more than 400,000 hits.
With the quantum leaps in communication technology over the last 10 years, the failure to communicate effectively has become a mortal sin, whether you’re talking about communication within an organization or between an organization and its partners or customers.
…
But enabling this kind of communication takes changes in practices and behaviors as well as technology. In addition to its impact on customer and agent communication, these changed expectations have a significant potential impact on the way IT leaders will manage their own organizations and their relationships with their business counterparts, in four key areas: information accessibility, skills inventory, activity transparency and customer communication with business counterparts.
Read the complete article here.
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February 3rd, 2010 by Matthew Josefowicz
New I&T Video on what’s going on in Policy Administration Systems.
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February 1st, 2010 by Matthew Josefowicz
I’m pleased to announced that Novarica’s ACE Rankings (http://www.novarica.com/acerankings.shtml) will serve as the basis for Technology Decisions’ new “RAVE” Awards for insurance technology solution providers (more details at www.tech-decisions.com). The awards will be presented at the ACORD/LOMA conference this May in Las Vegas.
In addition, from now through February 24, 1 out of every 25 insurer executives who ranks a technology product or service provider at http://www.novarica.com/acerankings.shtml will win an 8 GB/3G iPod Touch.
To qualify, insurer execs must have direct experience with the product or service they are ranking. Insurer execs may rank more than one product or service provider to increase their chances of winning.
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January 27th, 2010 by Robert Ellis
Changes will impact plan participants, sponsors, advisors and product manufacturers, resulting in an industry-wide reshuffling.
Register for Webinar on Feb 17 at 2 pm ET.
January 28, 2010 (New York) - According to a new report from research and advisory firm Novarica (www.novarica.com) , a new development in the 401(k) space may put trillions of dollars into play for advisors and plan manufacturers, while also exposing legal and fiduciary liability for plan sponsors. Due to the new BrightScope.com web site and database, the lack of transparency that has always pervaded the 401(k) industry is rapidly becoming a relic of the past.
Americans are relying more and more on their 401(k) plans for funding their future retirements. Bad or expensive plans are costing American workers too much in terms of delayed retirements and lower plan balances. BrightScope has developed a database and rating engine to score and benchmark plans, and provides detailed data that explicitly tells employees, sponsors, advisors and plan manufacturers just where their current plans fall short.
- According to the report, the roll out of BrightScope will result in:
- Sponsors moving to purchase more cost-effective and attractive plans to meet their fiduciary duty to plan participants.
- Participants gaining better investment and retirement outcomes from their 401(k) plans as they pressure sponsors to provide benefits and utilize lower-cost plans similar to others among their peer group firms.
- Advisors will be able to sell more-competitively based on the transparency of plan data showing the current costs of both the overall plan and the underlying investment choices.
- Manufacturers will be forced to develop lower-cost plans to reflect a more transparent and competitive marketplace. Due to the BrightScope solution, plan and investment option costs are projected to rapidly decline in the 401(k) industry.
Novarica believes that the BrightScope ratings will eventually have a similar impact to the Morningstar ratings on mutual funds, identifying future winners and losers in the 401(k) industry.
“America is looking to defined contribution plans, such as 401(k)s, to replace the defined benefit pension plans, and to take the stress off Social Security,” states Robert J. Ellis, Principal and head of Wealth Management at Novarica, and lead author of the report. “The problem was that, for most of the industry participants, the lack of transparency meant that plans were more expensive than they needed to be. Especially bloated were the fees charged on the underlying investments. BrightScope.com, combined with new Federal regulations, will change all that for the betterment of American workers’ retirement outlooks, but current providers will need to adjust to a radically altered marketplace.”
The 14-page report is available from Novarica at http://www.novarica.com/report_brightscope_401k.shtml . Mr. Ellis will also be hosting a webinar discussing the report on February 17 at 2 PM Eastern. Interested attendees may register online at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/760027265 .
Posted in Economy, Innovation, Press releases, Wealth Management, Webinars | No Comments »
January 26th, 2010 by Matthew Josefowicz
Over the past three months, we’ve conducted 30 minute phone interviews with over 90 of the 150 members of the Novarica Insurance Technology Research Council. These interviews were guided by identifying activities and needs related to the areas described by the Novarica Insurance Core Systems Map, and followed a conversational flow.
The resulting Special Report is now available: a 56-page presentation-style report analyzing these interviews by size, sector, and functional area, and providing an unparalleled view into the priorities and issues of US insurer CIOs for 2010.
Posted in IT Spending, Insurance | No Comments »
January 20th, 2010 by Matthew Josefowicz
Great conversation today with 20+ CIO members of our Research Council in a joint event between our NYC and Chicago offices linked by web video conferencing. Topics ranged from IT budgets to agent portals and core policy admin to business intelligence practices , web 2.0 and infrastructure strategies. We’re looking forward to our virtual meetings throughout the year, and our next live event in August in New England.
Current members of the council can download materials here. Interested members (insurer CIOs or senior IT executives) can request to join the council here.
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January 19th, 2010 by Matthew Josefowicz
I’ll be presenting on an I&T webinar on Document Automation for insurers in a multi-channel world, Thursday 1/21 at 12 pm EST. Register at: https://www.techwebonlineevents.com/ars/eventregistration.do?mode=eventreg&F=1001947&K=CAA1AC
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January 18th, 2010 by Martina Conlon
I’m featured as a guest speaker in a new vendor-hosted podcast on product configuration and policy admin systems. You can listen here.
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January 12th, 2010 by Robert Ellis
January 12 (New York) - Novarica (www.novarica.com), a research and advisory firm focused on markets, operations, and technology in insurance and wealth management, has issued a new report identifying best practices for wealth management firms to follow in order to maximize the benefits of Social Networking. Top findings from the report include:
- Appropriate use of social networking tools is most beneficial when combined with online trading capabilities, resulting in increased client trading through better distribution of trading ideas and concepts, thereby increasing firm revenues. Without trading capabilities, social networking simply adds costs in terms of managing the new channels.
- Outside the self-service online brokerage industry, few wealth management firms are successfully deploying social networking tools, thereby missing opportunities to increase client loyalty and capture the elusive Generation Y investor, the future of wealth management.
- Firms need to incorporate social networking at their own sites and on their own servers to ensure appropriate compliance; having advisors doing their own thing on Twitter and Facebook is a recipe for a compliance disaster.
“Social networking is a powerful dynamic sweeping communications and peoples’ daily interactions through technology. By combining social networking tools with online self-service capabilities, wealth management firms can build powerful integrated offerings that improve trading volume and client loyalty while creating a methodology for firms to capture the still-elusive Gen Y investor,” comments study author Robert J. Ellis, a principal and head of wealth management at Novarica.
The 15-page report includes tables outlining current social networking of leading institutions and is available from Novarica at http://www.novarica.com/report_social_networking_wm.shtml. Mr. Ellis will also be hosting a webinar discussing the report on January 27 at 2 PM Eastern. Interested attendees may register online at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/141451256
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January 9th, 2010 by Matthew Josefowicz
Speaking in a recent article in Insurance Networking News on Cloud Computing and Security, analyst Tse Wei Lim pointed out that analytics and the increasing trend information accessibility has its own, more pressing security challenges.
Tse Wei Lim, an analyst in the insurance practice at New York-based Novarica, agrees that cloud computing has broad security implications but argues that it is not widely adopted enough in the insurance industry to have immediate ramifications. Rather, he sees the widespread use of analytics as a more pressing security concern. “The next big thing that CIOs will need to worry about is the increasingly pervasive use of analytics and BI tools at all levels of their organization,” he says. “As insurers begin to see the benefits of analytics, and the tools become more powerful and more affordable, IT departments will begin to see greater demand from the business side for more data to be made more widely available. The security challenge then will be for CIOs to work out how to satisfy this demand while keeping that data secure.”
For more of Tse Wei’s work on this topic, see this report.
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