Entries by Mark O'Brien

The Decreasing Increase

Based on some of our recent reading, there seems to be a disparity of opinions as they pertain to the employment market: Exhibit A: According to an article in PropertyCasualty360, “The number of insurance professionals aged 55 years and older … increased 74 percent [between 2006 and 2016].” Exhibit B: According to a study published […]

Be Careful What We Wish For

We’re tech people. We’ve always thought we’re tech people so insurance people wouldn’t have to be tech people. And we’ve always felt like we were alone in that thinking. But the tide may be starting to turn. The February edition of Best’s Review ran an article entitled, “Generation Next”, contending that the traditional focus of the […]

Tight Lips Sink Ships

If you’re familiar with the expression, “Loose lips sink ships,” you understand why too much information (TMI) can be a bad thing. By the same token, too little information (TLI) can be equally bad. Case in point: The insurance industry seems conspicuously tight-lipped when it comes to information about implementations. As a result, there’s precious […]

How About Insurance Insurance?

We saw this question the other day: How much chain could a blockchain block if a blockchain could block chain? It accompanied this cartoon: We’re not trying to play similar word games with insurance. But we can’t help wondering: How much insurance could an insurance company write if an insurance company had insurance for its […]

What a Difference a Year Makes

According to FinTech Global, this may not be the best time to be getting involved in insurtech. As of May, 2017, interest in insurtech was on the wane. Investments in insurtech were down more than 70 percent in the first quarter of 2017 vs. the first quarter of 2016. And here in North America, plumbing […]

What’s Required?

We once heard it said that most companies replace systems before they’ve used 80 percent of those systems’ capabilities or capacities. We were skeptical at first. But the more we thought about it, and the more we looked at systems, the more true it became. Here’s why: Most companies decide to replace systems because of […]

Get It Right the First Time

Given the business we’re in, we like to keep an eye on the trends, attitudes, and inclinations of the companies we might consider prospects in the industry we’re in, that being insurance. Consequently, we took note of a survey of 396 CIOs and technology leaders by the consulting firm, Protiviti. Two things in particular caught our […]

Mind Your Ps and Queues

Whenever someone refers to the proverbial Three Ps, they’re typically referring to the prevailing wisdom about the way in which businesses should value their assets. In that context, they’re referring to: People Process Product. In that context, we agree with those Three Ps. But some others are worthy of consideration. We offer them here for […]

We OWN This

We’re quite aware of the fact that the insurance industry has considerably more than its share of acronyms. With examples like ASOP, BOP, CRIS, DEC, and others for every letter of the alphabet, we hardly need any more. But we’ve decided to create one, nevertheless: OWN. We’ll forgive you if the first thing you think […]

Why Is That?

For all the talk about insurtech, we still live in a world of aging systems, outdated architectures, all required to keep pace with the countless processes required to run an insurance business. Why is that? Much of what’s being touted as insurtech comes from people new to the insurance industry. People who do work in […]