Entries by Mark O'Brien

Roots and Wings

The man depicted here was born 200 years ago. What’s that? You don’t know him? If not, don’t worry. It’s not terribly surprising. And it’s okay. History can tend to obscure such people after a while. His name was James Goodwin Batterson. He was born in 1823 in either Bloomfield or Windsor, Connecticut. The accounts […]

The Forecast Calls for Change

The first single from Robert Cray’s 1990 album, Midnight Stroll, was “The Forecast Calls for Pain“. We couldn’t help thinking of that song when we read a couple of recent forecasts about the insurance industry for 2023. In its report, Property and Casualty-Insurance Top Trends 2023, Capgemini wrote this, in part: Personalized value-added services can […]

The Digital Promise: Part Two

Matteo Carbone, an insurance industry strategist with a specialization in innovation, wrote a post for Insurance Thought Leadership called, “Lemonade: No Sign of Disruption Yet“. In the post, Carbone pointed this out: Lemonade has written almost $370 million in premiums (showing 42% growth from 2020) … with a combined ratio (gross of reinsurance) above a 150% […]

The Digital Promise: Part One

A recent post from Insurance Thought Leadership — “A Wake-Up Call for Insurers” — says this, in part: Insurers have been talking about going digital for a good decade now, and seemingly everyone says the pandemic greatly accelerated the trend over the past three years by forcing us all to interact remotely. Yet ACORD says […]

The Great Awakening: Part Two

In our previous post, we wrote this: The new normals are change and uncertainty. That means The Great Awakening isn’t a one-time event. It’s necessarily ongoing, evolving, and unpredictable. We can evolve with it — embrace it, roll with it, and learn to make the most of it — or not. Since publishing that post, […]

The Great Awakening

P&C Specialist recently published an article that gave us pause. The title of the article is “Insurers Struggle to Keep Staff Connected, Engaged“. In case you haven’t yet subscribed to P&C Specialist, this is the part that caught our attention: With the new world of remote and hybrid work, many employers are struggling to boost […]

Witch’s Glitches: Halloween Edition

Today is Halloween. Most of us expect to be scared today in some form or fashion by someone or other. Ghosts, gremlins, and goblins lurk about, waiting to yell BOO! when we least expect it. If you have anything to do with software, you know ghosts, gremlins, goblins, and glitches have to be contended with […]

A Call to Arms

We don’t consider the insurance industry or insurance technology to be particularly militant. But we suppose it’s possible for martial metaphors to sneak in almost anywhere. At least that’s what we thought when we saw this headline in Carrier Management: “Tech Arms Race Favors Giant Commercial Carriers“. In an interview cited in the article, Mo […]

The Certainty of Uncertainty

Because we work in the insurance industry, we do our best to … well … keep up with the insurance industry. Nevertheless, something PwC published earlier in the year — “Next in insurance: Top insurance industry issues in 2022” — managed to get by us, until now. We were really grabbed by this headline: “The […]

Know Your Vendor

While thumbing through the February edition of CIO magazine, we came to this article: “A tsunami of IT project disasters is on the horizon“. You already feel better about that core system replacement you’ve been contemplating, don’t you? If that didn’t cheer you up, this certainly will: We’re talking spectacular failures that disrupt supply chains, delay […]