Novarica at ACORD/LOMA

May 14th, 2012 by Matthew Josefowicz

The Novarica Team will be out in force at ACORD/LOMA this week.

 

Chad Hersh will be presenting Tuesday at 12:00 pm on “Digital Transformation Across the Value Chain of Insurance”

 

 

 

Karlyn Carnahan will be presenting on Wednesday at 9:45 on “Emerging Trends in Property Casualty Claims”

 

 

Matthew Josefowicz will be presenting on Thursday at 2:15 on the analyst panel, “Certain Strategies for an Uncertain Future”

 

 

Also attending the conference from Novarica will be:

Greg Wittenbrook, Principal

Sarah Bogan, Senior Analyst

Thuy Nguyen, Analyst

 

 

 

 

 

 

Follow us on Twitter at @novarica!

PS – If you’re wondering who Greg is, please see our new hire announcement here.

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Novarica and Tech Decisions Announce 2012 Rave Awards

May 14th, 2012 by Matthew Josefowicz

Matthew Josefowicz

Novarica and Tech Decisions are pleased to announce the third annual 2012 RAVE Awards to recognize insurance software and IT service providers that deliver outstanding solutions based on feedback from their customers. Customers rated their vendor and the solution in staff, organization, functionality, technology, and overall satisfaction across 10 categories. Vendors whose customers completed Novarica’s ACE (Average Customer Experience) Ranking survey were eligible for a RAVE Award. You can read the full press release here.

The RAVE Awards were designed to recognize those solutions that are delivering exemplary value to their customers as measured by those customers themselves. As the number of insurers looking to solution providers for their technology needs grows, so too does the value of current client experience. Although the insurance industry has a long history of building its own technology solutions, the pendulum has been firmly passed on the ‘buy’ side of the ‘build vs. buy’ spectrum for the past few years across most core application areas.

We congratulate the 2012 winners.

For more about the Novarica ACE Rankings and a full list of ranked solutions, click here.

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IT Benchmarking: Novarica’s Supply and Demand Approach

May 10th, 2012 by Matthew Josefowicz

Matthew Josefowicz

External benchmarking data is an important tool for insurer CIOs in both self-assessment and communication with senior business management. Benchmark data can provide critical support for spending and budgeting decisions, and can highlight potential areas of concern that may not be noticeable without external reference points.

Last month, we polled the Novarica Insurance Technology Research Council on IT spending. You can access the full report, Quick IT Benchmarks for US Insurers: Overall Averages, by clicking here. In addition to the report’s findings, what makes this report significant is our “Supply and Demand” approach to IT assessment. Rather than focus exclusively on spending levels, our report contextualizes spending levels (Supply) against company size, new project volume, and current state of the organization, technology infrastructure, and product volume and complexity (Demand).

This approach allows insurers to look at IT spending in a valuable new way: the benchmarking data is presented and understood within the context of the variation between peer circumstances and business needs. No insurance company ever became more successful than its peers by spending less than them on IT. The path to competitive advantage lies in spending appropriately to create and support necessary business capabilities.

Click here to access Novarica’s full report on 2012 averages in IT Benchmarks for US Insurers.

Break-out reports examining specific insurer peer groups are also available here.

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Do PAS Projects Pay Off for P&C Insurers?

May 9th, 2012 by Chad Hersh

Chad Hersh

Core policy administration replacement is one of the highest priority projects among P&C insurers. Nearly every one of those insurers has the same questions: how does our project (or potential project) compare to those of our peers? Are we spending too much? What results can we expect to gain? What has been the experience of others who’ve taken this step?

To answer those questions, Novarica partner Matthew Josefowicz and I looked at core policy administration projects completed by 37 P&C insurers over the past 10 years. The resulting report outlines project impacts, average resource utilization, costs, and timeframes, and discusses major challenges faced and overcome.

The full report details a number of key findings, notable among them the fact that the vast majority of PAS projects have been replacements for one or more existing systems, rather than projects where a new system is added to support a new line of business. And unsurprisingly, P&C insurers are spending on projects that support their biggest books of business.

But the question remains: is an investment in a PAS project worth it? The answer, it seems, is yes: the majority of insurers cited 25% or greater improvement in speed to market, data accessibility, and technology risk as a result of their projects—three key drivers for P&C insurers as they work to modernize their systems.

To see how your PAS project spending stacks up, click here to read Novarica’s full report, US P/C Policy Administration Projects: Averages and Metrics.

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The Multi-Channel Imperative

May 8th, 2012 by Matthew Josefowicz

Matthew Josefowicz

Good discussion on today’s webinar about mutli-channel communication with Generali. One of the biggest challenges for insurers is that unfortunately, new channels don’t necessarily displace old ones across the board. As this chart from our multi-channel survey report shows, agents gravitate towards the most convenient channel for each task.

My key takeaways for webinar attendees today:

  • The nature of the insured/distributor/company relationship has changed due to the increased flow of information
  • Distributors and customers expect rich information, speed and convenience, choice of channels with consistent experience
  • There are no more acceptable excuses for delays, inaccurate, or inaccessible information.
  • Insurance companies are investing to keep up with these increased expectations.
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Product Agility an Emerging Incentive for L&A Core System Modernization

May 7th, 2012 by Chad Hersh

Chad Hersh

I had another great conversation with Insurance & Technology’s Anthony O’Donnell today, this time to discuss where L&A carriers rank speed to market among their needs in core system modernization projects. As I explained to Anthony, core system replacement is being driven by a number of needs, including speed to market, data transparency, and better distributor and customer self-service.

But while vendor marketing messages and many pundits continue to (correctly) point out the need for speed to market, another critical need has emerged: product agility. Speed to market implies the need to get a product to market quickly, but product agility is the ability to add any new product to the system–whether the admin system supports it today or not. Many carriers seeking to add a long-term care rider to an annuity have to wait for vendors to improve their systems; think Medicare Supp or Medicare Part D as examples of healthcare legislation driving rapid product introduction needs, and look out a year or two at the huge potential changes.

To read Anthony’s full story on L&A insurers’ need for speed and agility in core system modernization, click here.

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Why Insurers Need to Take Mobile Security Seriously

May 3rd, 2012 by Chad Hersh

Chad Hersh

I had an interesting conversation today about mobile security with Anthony O’Donnell from Insurance & Technology. In 2001, I got my first ‘web-enabled’ cell phone. With its WAP browser, I could basically read news and search Google, but little else. It worked at well below dial-up speeds, and wasn’t even a color screen. Today, I literally tell my phone what I want, and it retrieves it at speeds that put my home and office internet connections to shame, on a screen that makes me sad to go back to my HDTV. With apps now available that support crucial business functions such as e-signatures in PDFs (yes, there’s an app for that), smartforms, and even an app or two for agent access to policy administration systems and devices becoming more pervasive and more connected, it’s all but inevitable that mobile devices will erode the role of the laptop and desktop for consumers and agents dealing with carriers.

These devices are no longer futuristic or even fads. A huge chunk of the emails and social media posts I see today come from mobile devices from Blackberrys to iPads. In fact even the regulators are recognizing this with several states approving or close to approving the use of an electronic insurance ID card (e.g., showing a police officer your ID card on your iPhone). With this mobile explosion comes the opportunity for even more, with inexpensive telematics that leverage a smartphone’s Bluetooth and data connection, down to the use of existing agent laptops in the field leveraging phones’ Wi-Fi hotspots. Mobile devices may not only be the preferred channel of the future; they may be the dominant channel.

The security requirements for mobile aren’t necessarily novel, but rather are extensions of the security needs of the desktop, the Blackberry, the laptop, and the cell phone. When it comes to personal data, most consumers are perfectly happy to use the iCloud or Google to back up their important data and simply report their phone lost, but for enterprises the ability to wipe data from a phone is just the start. Remotely wiping only enterprise data from the phone of a terminated employee (without impacting the rest of the phone), installing anti-virus/anti-malware software, and providing and/or limiting access to the corporate network via the mobile device are just the start.

That being said, they need to be taken as seriously as those other platforms. As the lines blur between phones and tablets (for example, Samsung’s 5-inch smartphone/almost-tablet, the Galaxy Note) and between tablets and PCs (the iPad and especially the upcoming Windows 8 tablets), device usage by employees, agents, and customers will grow dramatically and mobile security will need to improve along with it.

This was one of the topics we covered in 2012 Council Meeting. To see our report from that meeting, click here.

To read Anthony O’Donnell’s article from Insurance & Technology, click here.

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Best’s Review Article on Saas/Cloud

April 10th, 2012 by Chad Hersh

Chad Hersh

Our recent research on SaaS and Cloud is featured in Lori Chordas’ article on Pay as You Go technology in the April edition of Best’s Review, which is available online.

While adoption in core insurance systems is still relatively limited and “true cloud” (platform as a service) is not widely used by insurers, many insurers are gaining speed and cost advantages by turning to hosted applications.

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Novarica Research Council Impact Awards 2012

April 2nd, 2012 by Matthew Josefowicz

Here’s an overview of our Impact Awards program. Deadline for information submission is June 30. Download the submission form here.


Novarica Research Council Impact Awards Information

The awards will be judged by all 300 members of the council, making them the largest peer-jury awarded recognition in the industry.

Nominees from for the award will be selected from a collection of case studies that we’re currently working on by a nominating committee of Research Council members, including Andy Wood (Wilton Re), Dan Simpson (Trustmark), Eric Bulis (SBLI USA), Larry Fortin (Millers Mutual Group), Mark Berthiaume (Chubb), Pete Moreau (Amica), Piyush Singh (Great American Insurance Company), Reuben Broadfoot (LifeMap), Sal Abano (Tower Insurance), Stuart Tainsky (PURE), and Tim Billow (ING).

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CIO Council Meeting Report Published and New Impact Awards Announced

March 26th, 2012 by Matthew Josefowicz

Matthew Josefowicz

More than 50 insurer CIOs gathered at the latest meeting of the Novarica Insurance Technology Research Council meeting last week in Providence, RI.Today, we’ve published a report that includes the materials presented at the meeting, plus summaries of the discussions. Current clients and council members can download the report for free. Non-member insurer CIOs are welcome to apply for membership here.

We’ve gotten great feedback from the meeting, including the following attendee quotes:

It gave me the opportunity to hear what others are doing, get some valuable lessons learned and gave me a second wind to continue to work through the relationship building process and governance issues. Well done!

The quality of the discussion and the thoughtfulness of both the attendees and presenters was high. The length of the meeting was just right. I liked having a chance to talk informally with people at the dinner the night before as well.

The Novarica Council event is the only place where the door is shut and CIOs from around the industry speak openly and honestly about how to solve real world problems…without being pitched hard by sales folks.

Novarica Research Council Impact Awards

Also, at the meeting, we unveiled our new Novarica Research Council Impact Awards, which will be judged by all 300 members of the council, making them the largest peer-jury awarded recognition in the industry.

Nominees from for the award will be selected from a collection of case studies that we’re currently working on by a nominating committee of Research Council members, including Andy Wood (Wilton Re), Dan Simpson (Trustmark), Eric Bulis (SBLI USA), Larry Fortin (Millers Mutual Group), Mark Berthiaume (Chubb), Pete Moreau (Amica), Piyush Singh (Great American Insurance Company), Reuben Broadfoot (LifeMap), Sal Abano (Tower Insurance), Stuart Tainsky (PURE), and Tim Billow (ING). For more on the case studies and awards, click here.

 

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