According to the Insurance Information Institute, there were 6,118 insurance companies in the U.S. and its territories in 2014 with net written premiums totaling over $1.1 trillion. There are constant acquisitions and the pressure to create new and innovative insurance products and speed them to market is front of mind for insurance executives.
In both segments of the market, these pressure’s mount for the technology and operational teams. The need for new insurance products and the IT systems and innovation to support them touche all systems: Policy Admin, Billing, Claims, Underwriting, Reinsurance, Workers Comp, to Financial Systems, Compliance, Master Data Management, ECM, Customer Communications Management and let’s not forget Information Security.
We are seeing a rise in IT spending in the insurance sector because of the pressure to keep up. Old legacy systems don’t keep up with the changing business needs. With consolidation often comes the need to expand on existing technologies (increased licenses, ELA’s, etc.) in order to bring in data from the acquired company. And let’s not forget about the critical importance of having that “single point of reference” for a customer when larger carriers have multiple systems of each type mentioned (thus the need for Master Data Management by companies like Informatica, Oracle, IBM and others.
SMF recently saved national insurance carrier over $600K on a new policy administration purchase from a top-tier policy administration vendor. How? Read more below.
HOW CAN YOU CONTROL, OR EVEN REDUCE IT COSTS & PURCHASE CYCLES?
Spend Management has been around for years in some form of fashion. Procurement teams often have software or systems in place to help “manage” the procurement process including costs, licensing, contracts, etc. But many procurement teams have some key ingredients missing that could help make them even more effective, ingredients that SM Financial has and uses for Spend Management Consulting:
* Data on thousands of purchases
* Recent data on specific solutions, vendors and spend categories
* A risk-free method for insurers and large agencies to engage with no cost
* A team of experts that come from both the vendor side of the business as well as a background in insurance (we know the “vendor playbook”)
Often times the leverage of a 3rd party partner to help IT and Procurement teams with insight and actionable data on recent purchases by other organizations is underestimated. It can accelerate the buying cycle. It can also bring tremendous leverage to negotiations in an evaluation or purchase process. The timing of that engagement can be different for every deal.
As mentioned previously, the beauty of SM Financial’s methodology is that we engage on a no-risk, success-only basis. When we save you money (typically 20-40%), you only pay us a small portion of those savings. It’s a win/win. And we’ve worked with insurance vendors large and small including companies like StoneRiver, Majesco, Insurity, Guidewire, Vertafore, Sungard, Oracle, Insuresoft, Duck Creek, OnBase, DocFinity, Thunderhead, ISCS, Sapiens, Silvervine, CGI, CSC, IBM, to name a few. Contact us to find out more.