Ready By Design

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The outbreak of the coronavirus constitutes a profound test for the insurance industry. More pointedly, it’s a test of your company’s ability to continue operations without staff members being in the office. The fact is, now more than ever, insurers will have to rely on the contingency plans they put in place and the software they use to ensure disaster recovery and business continuity. And now more than ever, insurance is essential, from the strategic complexities of assessing risks to the tactical simplicity of printing documents.

In anticipation of operational interruptions of any sort, more than 10 years ago we developed the capabilities for entities to act as virtual insurers. There’s no need for bricks and mortar, other than a mailing address for legal purposes. All processes and transactions could be completely conducted online. All printing and check issuance could be outsourced. As a result, and because the Finys Suite is an online system, your employees can do their jobs without coming into the office. Print still goes out. Checks still go out. Claims still get processed. And for most of our customers, we  manage all the hardware and software they need to run their core systems.

There’s More

Because of the capabilities we’ve developed, all our employees are now working from home. All implementation and development work is being completed without significant interruption. We’ve developed some new management-reporting protocols. We’re gathering specifications for two new implementations that will begin this month. And our sales efforts continue apace, albeit without travel.

It’s not our intent to exploit the difficulties caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Rather, it’s our intent to take responsibility for doing what we can to help the industry we love and serve weather this storm and serve its constituents as comprehensively as possible. Yes. We’re a software company. Yes. We did prepare ourselves and our customers for an eventuality such as this. But it’s not our intent to take advantage of it.

We’re all in this together. And if we pull together, we’ll move more weight across the finish line of this pandemic.

The coronavirus is now. We can’t know what might be next. But we’re ready for it, by design.

Please let us know how we can help you be ready now and for the future.

Fly(wheel) By Night

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From conversations you’ve had with us, conversations you’ve had about us, and the messaging you’ve been exposed to (particularly in our blog posts), you’ve likely gotten the gist of our corporate culture. We aren’t a huge operation, but we consider that a strength. We aren’t a small operation, but we’ve managed our growth judiciously. As our workload increases, we’re able to scale our staff-counts to accommodate that growth. We’re not a start-up. We’ve been consistently providing a sound product for almost 20 years.

When we first heard about the recent lawsuit involving Peloton and Flywheel, we thought Peloton was using its size to crush a smaller competitor. We’re familiar with the feeling of having competitors much larger than we are. But we’ve been lucky that they’ve played fairly. There are plenty of big fish out there to which we might have been easy prey to unscrupulous competitive practices, especially in our early days. We sympathized with Flywheel. It seemed as if the big fish ate the little fish.

But as time went on, we learned the facts of the case. As the details began to emerge, we read this article. In particular, this quote from an internal Flywheel message that Peloton obtained during the case:

Discovery has now revealed that Flywheel engaged in an organized and illicit scheme, involving a significant number of Flywheel executives and employees, to obtain ‘as MUCH secret intel on Peloton as we can’ during the time it was designing and preparing to launch its infringing Fly Anywhere Bike.

The Morals of the Story

The little fish tried to steal intellectual property and market share from the big fish. That’s a different story. Stealing is one way to get ahead, but it’s not a way we’d ever respect or espouse. Peloton is fortunate to have had the size and the legal team required to stand up for itself.

The facts of this story also reminded us we may not always have correct first impressions. Open minds preclude rushes to judgment. And more facts yield better opinions.

We may not be the biggest, the smallest, or the newest fish in the policy administration sea. But, we’re happy to be swimming in it, with fair competitors, with conscientious customers, and with partners that honor our relationships.

Deceiving To the Core

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A recent review of trends for strategic initiatives in the insurance-industry showed core transformations remaining relatively flat over the period between 2015 and 2020. At first, we wondered why: Is it because the need is constant and is being addressed relative slowly and, perhaps, consistently? Especially in light of the fact that so much marketing communication and trade advertising seems devoted to legacy-system replacements and core transformation, we would have expected that particular initiative to be trending upward more steeply. We would have been wrong. Here’s why:

A Closer Look

On further review, we discovered that roughly 85 percent of all insurance companies are in the process of replacing their core systems. They’re all at different stages, of course. But since core-system replacements typically take so long, the fact that the trend line stays relatively flat become less surprising. And in more than a few cases, the replacement systems take so long to implement they’re obsolete before the transitions are complete.

Given those realities, it’s much more constructive, much less frustrating, and much less expensive in the long term to treat modernization as an ongoing process of continuous improvement. That’s why we don’t recommend standard buy-and-license models to our customers: Core transformation isn’t— and shouldn’t be considered — a once-and-done thing.

One More Thing

There may be some confusion between initiatives typically characterized as digital transformation or as core transformation. From the perspective of modernization, though, those terms may be red herrings. Everything today is digital. If it’s not, it’s quickly on its way to obsolescence. What that means is that insurance companies, particularly insurance companies that run multiple core systems, have to prioritize the value they’ll derive from modernizing each of them. (What are the chances any core transformation won’t be digital?) It’s entirely possible that their usage of or dependence on some of those core systems is so small they don’t warrant updating or modernizing. So, the companies continue to run them, as is, until a better option comes along.

While core-transformation trends may be appear to be flat, they’re flat at a very high level. And they’re flat at a very high level because, in most instances, modernization is and should be ongoing.

Don’t be deceived.