Las Vegas — The economy may be having an impact on Q4 spending, but the number of insurers, solution providers and analysts who attended ISOTech proves that there is still an interest amongst insurers to improve risk management and other core processes.
And for good reason, Frank Coyne, chairman, president and CEO of risk management technology giant
“P&C companies take on more risk than any of the other Fortune 500,” he told the group. “We don’t know what all the risks are, and we don’t know how to price the unknown.”
Coyne said between 1969 and 2007, 68% of companies went out of business, largely because of underwriting risk issues.
“This could explain AIG, whose motto was ‘no bad risk, only bad prices.’ When you don’t understand the risk, you don’t understand the cash flows associated with that risk and you find yourself in trouble,” he said.
Quoting from the Tom Peters’ book “In Search of Excellence,” and the change-agent philosopher Heraclitus, Coyne said, “For some insurers, the search for excellence became a failure. Why? It was a failure to recognize or understand change or respond to change.”
"Change comes at us from all different directions," he said. "Your challenge is to recognize and adapt as necessary to change."
Leaders who survive and thrive no matter what, said Coyne, are doing and thinking the following:
• They are informed opportunists
• They have direction and empowerment
• They use friendly facts (you need to know what is going on)
• They have congenial controls
• They do the math
• The believe in teamwork, trust, politics and power
• Philosopher Heraclitus was right—change is central to the universe.
• They have a commitment to leadership metrics.
“Winners will have ERM in all parts of their business,” Coyne concluded.
Held last week in Las Vegas, ISOTech’s roster of 670 attendees included 80 solution providers, 80 speakers and 35 concurrent educational sessions. The conference also hosted 17 technology showcases.
Those showcases and other news populated the conference. Full Capture Solutions launched Semantic 360 Data Mart—a service that provides a platform for insurance business analytics that optimizes the value of unstructured data. All digital content related to a claim is aggregated: structured data, unstructured text, coverage parameters, imaged documents, digital photos, audio and video. Structured and unstructured data, along with “scraped” text from imaged documents, are consolidated into a searchable format. In addition to unit claim views, data mart roll-ups are provided by line of business, agent, writing company and holding group.
Oracle, having acquired Insbridge and its rating products, issued a mouthful of a new offerings: Oracle Insurance Insbridge Rating and Underwriting. The product includes Oracle Insurance Rating Express, new rating templates, automated template reconciliation and pre-built industry content. ISO loss costs templates, available with the new offering, are designed to help facilitate compliance with corporate and industry standards, save development time, reduce likelihood of rating errors and increase speed to market for new rate programs. Templates feature pre-loaded ISO content, but users also can create custom deviations from the template content and maintain those customizations as new template versions are updated.
In other news from ISOTech, analytics technology provider SAS reported that Solvency II s beginning to loom large for European insurers, and the tenets of the regulation spill over to regulatory requirements for U.S.-based insurers. SAS is enhancing its data management platform to help insurers prepare for Solvency II. The company’s “Insurance Intelligence Architecture” includes an updated insurance data model to support risk analysis and risk-based capital calculations. The solution helps insurers gather data from operational applications then transform and cleanse the appropriate data into an enterprise view.
Source: INN editorial staff
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