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 and maximal independence with minimal complexity. As we listened to their requests and took them to heart, we decided we had two options:

1. We could make them completely dependent on us to all of the things they wanted to do by themselves.
2. We could give them access to exactly the same toolset our designers and developers use, which would enable them to do all the things they wanted to do by themselves.

After careful deliberation, a few sleepless nights, and a seance or two, we chose Option 2.

How Do We Define Success?

“What do our customers want us to do?” We could answer that question in a multitude of ways: They want us to process their insurance transactions. They want us to manage their claims. They want us to bill their policyholders. They want us to give them the best software we can develop to do those things. The list of answers goes on. All of them are only partly correct. What our customers really want us to do is to enable them to do more business more easily, more efficiently, more accurately, and less laboriously. That’s just what our Design Studio does.

We gave our Design Studio an intuitive user interface. We created pre-built line of business templates. We provided drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG fields and process aspects. We enabled real-time collaboration. We included report wizards. We developed automated regression testing. And we made sure users could administer security administration down to the level of individual fields.

It gives our customers exactly as much self-sufficiency as they want. We meet them online in our Design Lab. In joint design sessions, we work with them to establish functional objectives. We teach them how to configure the Suite, their products, their states, and their lines of business. We show them how to do those things simply and efficiently. We tell them they can have all the autonomy they want, but we’ll always be there to help them out and to back them up. That’s why we define our success by the success of our customers.

But help with your in-laws? Not so much.

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 days, costing nearly $400 million an hour in global trade losses. Now, cargo and vessel owners are asking, “Who foots the bill?”

That got us thinking about other chokepoints in the insurance industry. And while those chokepoints may not be as obvious as the blocking of the Suez Canal, the short-term, long-term, and additive costs of those chokepoints may actually amount to considerably more than $400 million.

Let’s Go To the Replay

For the sake of argument, we’ll assume a small insurance company has 100,000 premiums in force. If one administrative chokepoint costs the company just a dollar in resources (time and/or money) and opportunity per policy, eliminating that chokepoint would save the company … well, you can do that math. Chances are that insurance company,  any insurance company, has more than one chokepoint. And if you consider a large insurance company — one with 80 million policies in force, let’s say — the ROI on eliminating the corresponding chokepoints is a stakeholder’s dream come true.

In the article we’ve cited here, Marcus Baker, global head of marine and cargo from Marsh, is quoted several times. If we take one of his quotes and abbreviate it slightly, his argument extends beyond the blockage of the Suez Canal. Here’s the quote abbreviated:

We saw this problem play out early in 2020 … One of the things that this pandemic has shown us and even an incident like the Ever Given has shown us is that … Rather than focusing on the efficiency and low cost, we really need to look at a resiliency model.

That’s a pretty powerful point. It suggests resilience is precipitated by readiness. And readiness can be precipitated by making sure your people, your processes, and the technology products you use are responsive, flexible, configurable, and scalable.

We might even go so far as to suggest it takes a good chokepoint now and then to help us be prepared for the next one.

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 gone. It also was a year of opportunity, depending on they ways in which you viewed, accepted, and responded to the changes. As Sun Tzu said, “In the midst of chaos is also opportunity.” Now we’re almost halfway through 2021. If we learned anything in 2020, we should be well along in applying it now.

Here’s What We’re Doing

We’re investing heavily in research and development. And since we’re quoting people, we’ll point out that, while Malcolm X didn’t work in the insurance industry, he did say, “The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.” And if 2020 taught us nothing else, it taught us the best way to accommodate change is to always be anticipating it and preparing for it.

First and foremost, you want to try to get ahead of the curve. A lot of insurers were well-positioned for change. For those that were, 2020 paid dividends for them. Another of our favorite quotes is from Will Rogers, who said: “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” Case in point: One of our insurance carrier clients told us 2020 was their most profitable year ever.

Here’s What Insurers Should Be Doing

It’s important for insurers to put themselves in a position to take advantage of the turmoil. That may sound like a strange thing to say in a risk-averse business. But it’s true, nevertheless. If they employ the OODA loop — observe, orient, decide, act — they’ll be able to better identify their opportunities: Do they have the right systems in place? Are those systems modern enough to meet the growing demands of the 21st century — flexibility, configurability, responsiveness? Are they maximizing and optimizing their digital channels? Are they making sure they have the information they need to make the right decisions, to act quickly, decisively, and fruitfully in the face of uncertainty?

Are they giving their prospects and policyholders better digital experiences? Are their digital capabilities backed up by capable, well-staffed call centers to ensure service is accessible and well-managed if issues have to be escalated beyond digital channels? Are they offering their policyholders more and better opportunities for self-service? What about their agents? Are they looking out for them? Are they providing the fully functional portal to give them access to what they need? Are they providing mobile access? Do they have the tools to sell more and process less?

The Moral of the Story

The moral of this story is that 2021 will demonstrate what we learned in 2020. As long as we looked for those lessons, learned what they had the opportunity to teach us, and determined to take those lessons into the future, it’ll be harder to surprise us the next time.

The people who are exceptionally good in business are not so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.
(Michael Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited)

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 System. That seemed a little presumptuous. So, we dropped the acronym idea.

Okay. We’re kidding. Finys was never an acronym, and we never intended it to be one. But we do get asked what it means quite a bit. So, we might as well tell you.

The Truth of the Matter

Finys is a play on the word, finesse. Inspired by the saying, “Don’t force it. Use a bigger hammer,” we were convinced we could build a system, a suite of separate but interconnected modules, that could be implemented and operated with a bit more flair and flexibility than other systems. We wanted to develop a suite that would process property/casualty insurance configurably, without imposing a cumbersome array of prescriptive rules and limiting constraints. We even wanted to include a degree of artistry. That’s why we call our configuration toolset — that features an intuitive user interface; pre-built line of business templates; drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG fields and process aspects; and report wizards — Design Studio.

We also wanted to build some finesse into the way we did business, the way we priced and implemented the Finys Suite. That’s why we assign fixed costs for the product and its implementation, amortized over five years. Putting that kind of skin in the game clearly demonstrates our commitment to doing right things, even as it significantly mitigates our customers’ risk and exposure. And it clearly indicates their success is as important to us as it is to them.

The Bottom Line

So, what does Finys stand for? It stands for integrity. It stands for reliability and accountability. It stands for flexibility and configurability. And it stands for satisfied customers.

If Finys were an acronym, it could stand for Finys Is Nifty, You See.

But it’s so much more than that.

’Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes. (The Cobbler of Preston by Christopher Bullock, 1716)

Many of us are, no doubt, familiar with those two most famous examples of certainty. And the fact is, everything else is pretty much up for grabs. Flash back to the end of February 2020. How many of us imagined the ensuing year would transpire the way it did, would see a global pandemic, would change the ways in which we live, work, and socialize? We rest our case.

The abiding lesson from the past year, of course, is that we all need to be as well prepared as possible for the unexpected (short of clairvoyance). We need to be as resourceful as possible as we confront the unexpected, however it manifests (short of a planet-destroying galactic calamity). And we have to be as mindful as possible of the needs of those we serve (short of surveying them non-stop, which might be the only thing worse than a planet-destroying calamity).

What Happens Next?

We have no idea. If we did, we’d be in a completely different line of work; although, we’d probably shy away from phone psychic. Kidding aside, and even though we really don’t know what will happen next, some things seem fairly predictable:

• If you sell property/casualty insurance, you’ll have prospects and policyholders.
• If you have prospects, they’ll want to be able to evaluate and purchase policies, to understand coverage limits and exclusions, and to have flexible billing and payment options.
• If you have policyholders, they’ll want to be full informed at all times, to have digital access to their policy and claims information, and to have whatever level of self-service with which they might be comfortable.
• If you want to be as responsive to your prospects and policyholders as they expect you to be, you’ll need a processing suite with the functionality to provide that responsiveness and with the scalability to grow as your business grows.

If we go any farther than that, we’ll be tooting our own horn. And nobody needs that.

But we’re here to help when you’re ready to live with uncertainty.

And you won’t need a psychic hotline.