Business pressure forces decisions. It can force bad decisions, such as short-sighted moves and impulsive choices made to relieve pressure. Pressure can also force good decisions, when companies execute on strategic priorities to be relevant and competitive. Most insurers are in a sort of pressure-cooker situation where challenges are creating pressure and good decisions need to be made. They are looking at their financials, growth, profitability, pace of technology change, increasing risk, and customer demands to determine next steps with their technology foundation. These are tough, deep con ..read more

At some point between preschool and first grade, a parent or a teacher may have introduced you to the balance beam. It’s an important physical and psychological step. Walking the beam gives kids confidence, and it helps them to appreciate the importance of balance. The balance beam also introduces children to an element of the mysterious — one of their first big mind tricks. If they look forward (out toward the end of the beam) they find it much easier to balance than if they look down at their feet. It’s counterintuitive. Ignore the feet and let the mind guide the steps to the endpoint. This ..read more

Every trend has an impact and corresponding implications. Avocados are healthy, for example, but avocado demand has caused environmental issues. E-mail, messaging, and tools like Slack help us get answers quickly, but interruptions can harm deeper ideas, better communication, and long stretches of focused thought. Smartwatches track our health and foster good habits, like sleep, but for some personalities, they cause unnecessary stress and obsession. “Everything in moderation” seems to be the universal truth that can help with handling trends. The insurance industry has its own set of trends ..read more

The concept of speed is increasingly becoming an important competitive factor when presenting rating information for specialty insurance risk coverage. Turnarounds of weeks or days to evaluate, quote, and bind policies are simply not acceptable in today’s hyper-competitive market. Insurance risks are diverse and ever-evolving, especially specialty insurance, which plays a crucial role in providing coverage for unique and high-risk situations. Whether it’s travel, aviation, marine, cyber, or any other specialized field, the ability to accurately assess and rate risk is paramount. Additionally ..read more

Carriers’ and MGAs’ core competencies are focused on creating, pricing, and delivering great products that match the needs of the marketplace. However, the next-gen software platforms needed to enable these core competencies are not typically in the insurance company’s wheelhouse. The InsurTech concept was developed to help insurers and their distributors replace manual processes and increase speed-to-market. Today, these processes are most effectively created and powered quickly by low-code, no-code SaaS coding platforms. Without the assistance of expertly created and deployed low-code/no-cod ..read more

Is your enterprise rating engine powerful and flexible enough to meet the needs of today’s market demands? The fact that many insurers are still using multiple policy systems – due to legacy, acquisitions, new business model launches, or lack of moving business to a next-gen solution – stand-alone enterprise rating engines are increasingly desired to externalize the rates, rules, and logic associated with a product to ensure ease of rapid or regular updates, flexibility and efficiency, consistency across the systems and most importantly, create speed-to-market. Insurers and MGAs are scrambling ..read more

Opportunity is real. An interesting result of our world economy and the rise in technology is that small businesses are on the rise, fueled by growing opportunities. Small businesses are now enabled by the offering of capabilities that used to be difficult and necessary but are now available as simple services or those which make any business run smoothly. Whether you have a fashion business on your small-town square, a bookstore operating out of your living room in the suburbs, or a food kiosk in an urban food court, you’re likely doing what you couldn’t do yesterday because you’ve been enabl ..read more

If you’ve ever been to the symphony, you are probably familiar with the pre-performance ritual. The players take the stage, find their places, and begin tuning instruments. A sweet cacophony fills the room. It feels disorganized, but if the performance is going to have any chance of achieving success, tuning is necessary. Strings need adjustments. Reeds need preparation. A few notes need to spill out before the instruments are ready to play music. It’s a principle that bridges disciplines and occupations. When a Top Fuel drag car pulls up to the line, mechanics are still tuning the idle mixtur ..read more

Every industry is in the midst of change — not just insurance. But insurance is tied to every industry, geography, and nearly every consumer or business, so the pressures insurers face are magnified by the pressures everyone else faces and vice versa. We’re all in this together. Today’s macro-economic factors are impacting all industries, including insurance.   For insurers, this has impacted profitability and growth in particular, creating stress.  While stress can be a negative, it can also be a positive because it creates opportunities to overcome business stressors that give ..read more

While 2023 is behind us, the impact continues to resonate in our strategies and operational plans for 2024, because many of the challenges and shifts we experienced continue to be in play and are intensifying.  Market economic factors, such as inflation, supply chain challenges, rising interest rates, and low unemployment are not abating. They are applying increased pressure to do business differently. Declining profitability, increased catastrophe losses, rising loss ratios, increased claims costs, rising reinsurance prices and tightening capacity, lower disposable incomes, and a growing ..read more