Fellow CIOs Laud Ameritas, Tokio Marine Initiatives

Novarica has announced the four winners of its 2015 Novarica Research Council Impact Awards, in which the 60 members of the analyst firm's CIO council recoginize insurer IT initiatives that created dramatic and demonstrable business impact.

“Insurer CIOs’ main challenge for 2016 is increasing the effectiveness of their IT teams while delivering capabilities in digital channels, data analytics, and core systems,” said Matthew Josefowicz, president/CEO of Novarica. “Our winners provide real-world examples of companies that are effectively addressing all four of these areas.”

Ameritas was honored in the Practice category for the adoption of a project execution framework that improved the effectiveness of IT by enabling better-informed decision making, resulting in a cost avoidance of more than 56,000 internal man hours and $3.6M in external spend. 

“By creating and maturing this process foundation, we believe we can drive value-based outcomes, align risk and investment levels, and improve execution excellence in a way that creates sustainable advantage," said Richard Wiedenbeck, CIO at Ameritas. 

Fidelity & Guaranty Life, a life and annuity insurer, was honored in the Quick Hit practice, for a project that launched a new e-application capability in under 4 months, exceeding its target premium of $300M in under 3 weeks and reducing not in good order policies applications from 60% to 15%.

“At FGL, we are focusing on using digital technology to improve the customer experience," said Sanjeev Singh, VP IT Strategy & Solution Delivery for the company. "The tremendous success of e-app initiative demonstrates our effective use of bimodal IT approach, agile delivery principles and extensive collaboration between our business and IT teams.” 

Tokio Marine was honored in the Expansion category for using analytics to improve agent management—combining 18 new market segments with a scoring model to diagnose sentiment and performance for thousands of independent agencies.

“We structured our Business Intelligence / Advanced Analytics program to leverage in-house tools and capabilities to derive ‘actionable’ outcomes for Customer Service representatives,” said Andrew Peel, chief information officer of Tokio Marine North America Services.  “Novarica’s Impact Award confirms analytics’ broad potential in the insurance industry and validates our program’s modeling and visualization efforts.”

Finally, HCC Insurance Holdings was honored in the Transformation categoryfor the launch of new products and a portal, which resulted in streamlined policy processing and year-over-year growth projections of 100%.

“This program was successful due to great collaboration between IT and business,” said Partha Srinivasa, HCC SVP and Group CIO. “We have rolled out four major products in a short period of time due to the highly flexible SOA based architecture."

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