Entries by Mark O'Brien

How Much Do We Need to Worry?

In a rather random Google search, we came across a paper published last year by the global IT consulting firm, Coforge. The title of the paper is “8 Challenges Threatening the Insurance Industry in 2020”. Since threatening sounded rather ominous (we might have gone with facing), we decided to give it a read. Lo and behold, we […]

Software Is a Service

No. That’s not a typo in the title. Yes. It’s a play on Software As a Service (SaaS). Yes. Our software is available in the cloud. But it’s also something we think about frequently when we’re asked, “What do you do?” The Obvious We provide an administration suite for property/casualty insurance. That means our suite […]

The End of What?

We happened to see a piece on the Gartner website the other day that said this, in part: Policy administration systems [provide] full end-to-end life cycle management … vendors are increasingly offering a comprehensive range of products with vendors looking to alternative capabilities to differentiate their offerings; for instance, front-end portals with embedded engagement tools. We have […]

DIY Means Design It Yourself

When most people think about designing something — a car, a software program, a rocket, the perfect in-laws, an insurance product — they usually think about something difficult and pretty messy. It doesn’t have to be that way, at least not always. Our customers were asking us for a toolset to give them maximal flexibility […]

What’s Up?

Now that we’re more than halfway through 2021, we were thinking about the de rigueur predictions that will soon be coming our way for 2022. For some reason, that put us in mind of the classic Budweiser commercial from 1999. After that, we decided to get serious; although, we really didn’t feel like it. It’s […]

Don’t Choke on Chokepoints

The June edition of Risk & Insurance ran an article about the blocking of the Suez Canal by the cargo ship, Ever Given. In the print edition, the article was entitled, “CHOKEPOINT!” In the print and digital editions, the article starts with this: In March, a large container ship blocked the Suez Canal for six […]

Rates of Change

We seem to have been writing and speaking a good deal lately about change — the changes undertaken during the COVID pandemic, the changes that could have and should have been considered before the COVID pandemic, and the changes we should be undertaking now in anticipation of the next pandemic or the next catastrophic business […]

Have You Looked?

Everyone seems to be talking about 2020, the coronavirus pandemic, and the lessons they’ve learned from both. What lessons did you learn? Have you looked for them? We mean really looked. Are you sure? Objectively speaking, it was a year of change. It had to be. As we were reminded constantly, the old normal was […]

That Thing’s Gonna Blow Up

We’re old enough to remember the days when our grandmothers would come to our childhood homes to help out with some of the chores. As she was washing the dishes by hand, we’d say, “But Gram, we have a dishwasher.” As she was washing the clothes by hand, we’d say, “But Gram, we have a […]

What Does Finys Stand For?

You might be surprised at how many times people ask us what Finys stands for. For a while, we thought about trying to make it an acronym. But in case you haven’t tried it, finding useful words that start with y is pretty tough. The best we could come up with was Finys Is Now Your […]