Change is a Constant in Insurance Research Area

For all the talk about “sameness” in the insurance industry, one area where there seems to be continuous movement is in the research analyst/consultant community. Here, the players and the research products being offered truly embrace American capitalism—competition at its finest.

For more than a year, that community has expanded and contracted, setting the stage for an abundance of new research products now available to insurers.

Last February when Boston-based Celent was acquired by consulting firm Oliver Wyman Group (a subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Cos.), it was bolstered by a global presence represented in 16 countries. Changes within the Celent organization came rapidly, with Craig Weber taking the lead in its U.S. insurance practice, and Chad Hersh and Matt Josefowicz leaving Celent to begin work at New York-based Novarica, a Novantas company. Novarica, meanwhile, announced the acquisition of Ben Stinson as its new industry relations manager. Stinson also joined Novarica from Celent.

Last week, Celent announced that Mike Harding would replace Octavio Marenzi as the new head of Celent. A senior partner at Oliver Wyman, Harding is positioned to leverage the analyst firm’s expertise in a number of areas and help deliver on the promise of producing collective intellectual capital.

“We are putting the right people in place to best handle the right tasks,” Weber told Insurance Networking News. “It’s significant that this is happening, because it will help us achieve some of the integration goals we’ve had all along.”

As a note of disclosure, to deliver the most compelling business and technology information possible, Insurance Networking News partners with both of these firms. Celent is instrumental in helping INN deliver its annual Vanguards in Insurance Practices awards, which reveals the top-ranked vendors in the industry. Based on its ongoing research, Novarica presents industry trends and advice in INN’s print publication. We value these relationships.

For INN, the debate about whether the players within either of these organizations will make a real difference in how they deliver their information, as well as whether the two organizations are truly free to speak about specific vendors in our space is ongoing. However, as the competition heats up, the amount of research that is coming out of both organizations is worth noting.

Novarica recently published its Market Navigator report, covering policy administration and life/health/annuity solutions, and is preparing its own vendor ranking, its ACE reports, due for release in June. Celent’s focus on the global insurance community has resulted in reports from Singapore and South Africa. Last week, Celent published “Handling the Crisis: Update on Q1 Insurance Industry Expectations and Strategies,” which focuses on U.S. and European insurers, and is set to release its policy administration reports for property/casualty companies in the coming weeks.