Often, Insurers and newer Insurtech companies need help in following areas:
Help determining the process in a Core Insurance Platform selection
Insurance Domain experience in P&C and specialty lines of business
Integration to cloud, data, analytics and Artificial Intelligence Platforms
Expertise around implementation for Governance, Project and Program Management, Business Requirements, System Architecture, Workflow, Integration, InsureTech (AI, etc.)
Help selecting a vendor for various requirements
Core Platform Selection & Implementation
It's an important decision to make. Which core insurance platform vendor to pick or, should you build it yourself?
Most often, that decision is to buy and when it is, we have so much experience in this space we can help you find the one that's the best fit for your business. If you are thinking about building your own, we can discuss whether this really makes sense or not. Building your own is not only risky, but maintaining and updating a bespoke platform can be extremely difficult.
Some core platform systems are best suited for commercial lines but are lacking in personal lines. Others are the reverse. Some fit smaller insurers or MGA's the best. Things to consider are your scalability needs, lines of business, integration requirements, cost to implement, time to implement, ease of maintenance, cost to buy and other licensing and whether or not you intend to grow, stay regional or get acquired. We can assist you in not only the selection but in negotiating a price that makes sense for your budget.
Once you decide, we also have the team and experience to assist you in building out the entire system, providing augmented resources to your team, and maintaining the system once it's up and running.
Insurance Domain experience
With many, many years in the industry and our involvement in over 100 implementations of core platform systems, we are able to assist InsureTech vendors who have a great technology, but also need to verticalize their system to the industry. We are happy to provide consulting around use cases, requirements and help you connect to the right insurance industry vendors.
Integration / Migration Services for Cloud, Data and AI
Whether you already have an existing system, or are looking into the future at more data and analysis capabilities or considering using artificial intelligence as part of your software stack, we're there for you.
Being a CIO myself for an insurance company, I know that we are often putting out fires and we have little time to consider what's next, but it's important to create a vision and map out that vision (in conjunction with your business partners) because our industry is changing at lightning speed.
Data warehouses and their integration into other functionality (such as AI) is critical. Properly designing your data warehouse and how it moves data from core platforms in your company means the ability to quickly analyze current and future profitability through a variety of data points.
Cloud services can be a great platform for data and core systems. There are latency and data security issues as well as scalability and uptime considerations. That said, if properly configured, they can relieve you of much of the infrastructure and maintenance of systems as well as large up-front capital costs.
Some core insurance platform vendors are now requiring the systems that were sold as an on-premises license to be moved to their proprietary cloud. This requires experience and planning. We can be of great help in working with the core system vendor, along with our team in transitioning your system with no down time.
Insurance companies are now looking very closely at AI. There are a lot of considerations to make. First AI is cloud based. Many AI vendors have great technology, but do not offer data security and share models and learning with other users. Some AI vendors offer some level of security and model ownership, but will require usage of their back in cloud services. Often these back end services are very expensive and GPU heavy. This racks up a hefty bill for monthly transactional expenses. We can be of help. We can be of help in not only selecting an AI vendor but seamlessly integrating the platform into your data and core insurance platforms. AI is here now and we are ready to help.
Governance
What I often find when rescuing a failed implementation is that the basics of Governance is not followed. This includes change management, basic project planning, project tracking and mitigation, communication between various groups about status, proper budgeting and budget tracking, proper involvement of the insurer's executives, etc.
We'll sit down with you and determine the best governance model for you. Not all companies are the same. I can assure you, with the proper governance, no matter the complexity of the project, we'll make sure everything stays on track.
Project and Program Management
Most of us understand the importance of managing a project, but I often find in rescues that although project plans were implemented, not all tasks were captured and there were no efforts to properly deal with change management. Lack of good change management can easily derail a project.
Our team members can provide, along with good governance principles, project planning that will ensure all the tasks are captured. Proper timelines are created. Budgets determined, change costs calculated, mitigation plans created for agreed upon changes or areas where unforeseen issues arise that affect deliverables and proper communication of statuses to teams and executives.
Business Requirements
There are many traps when it comes to capturing business requirements for a new system or a new insurance program.
When an insurer is implementing a new core insurance platform, an inexperienced Business Requirements Analyst often captures the same requirements from the old system, thus the insurer ends up with a new core insurance platform that is a copy of the old platform. I've seen this happen often when performing rescues.
Another trap is not utilizing the built in business rules of a new system. One of the best ways to get a new system up and running quickly is to leverage the existing canned templates that already exist in the new core insurance platform and make as few changes as you can live with. When we do these types of requirement gathering, we start with asking the business what within the new platform they can live with, and what needs to be changed. We then provide a cost estimate and timeline hit so the business can decide if the change is worth the cost. This is necessary because every change has a cost. In time and money. It also increase risk.
System Architecture
Even though you are buying a new core insurance platform and leveraging the business rules and templates, it's important to correctly architect the way the system is to operate and how the configuration of these rules are going to work with one another.
For example, a lot of systems use the inheritance model for rules. You make a rule for one state and then flow it to other to another using inheritance. Totally logical, however if the inheritance model is not correctly implemented, when you make a change to one state, you will end up having to test each and every state where that rule change inherited to. Even if that change affected only one state.
Poor system architecture can cause slow code, lack of scalability and difficult to maintain rates and rules. It can also increase the time and effort to role out critical rate changes which can cost substantial amounts of money.
Our teams have experience, and know exactly how to craft the architecture for your individual state and coverage model.