Ken Fries and I worked together a long time ago in Agency Automation at Aetna in Hartford. I left for Boston and Digital Equipment Corp. Ken stayed in Hartford and stayed in the insurance industry. His resume includes stints as the Vice President of Agency Strategy, eBusiness and Technology at The Hartford, an independent agency owner (he bought, built up and sold the agency over a five year period), AVP of Project Management & Efficiencies at Mass Mutual; and today he’s EVP of startup insurer Safeguard Guaranty. He knows as much about the state of technology deployment in the insurance industry as just about anybody on the planet.

So I gave him a call.

Bob:  Customer knowledge across lines of business has been an issue since we worked together at Aetna all those years ago. When I went to Digital, it was an issue we tried to address with data warehouses. Then, years later at EMC when I was the Insurance Industry Marketing Manager, we tried to address it with CRM and Enterprise Storage Networks. Is customer knowledge across lines of business still the holy grail for insurers?

Ken:  Maybe not considered to be the holy grail, but still very, very important in many different aspects.  First and foremost is the data. I believe, as do many companies, that data is still king. It indicates past performance of customers and predicts future traits in terms of buying patterns, needs, claims modeling and rate setting for pricing of products. Literally as we speak, Travelers is doing some heavy spending on data analytics and modeling based off this data. I have never seen an insurance company to date making such a tremendous commitment to acquiring and analyzing the data as they are currently doing.

Bob:  How is Safeguard Guaranty solving this issue?

Ken:  Well, we’re lucky in that we have no legacy systems to deal with. We’re putting systems in place that can truly capture customer data in an Enterprise fashion versus traditional segmented type systems by line of business or market segment.

Bob:  Do you think insurance industry executives are finally ready to tackle this beast?

Ken:  Certain firms like Travelers, Progressive and Geico are definitely committed to this, but many of the others are not yet prepared from a human resource/expertise perspective to understand the value of solving this issue… let alone ready to commit the substantial dollars needed to resolve it. They won’t do it, until the reality of losing their market share to companies like Travelers, Progressive and Geico hits them smack between the eyes.

So, it’s still an issue in much of the industry, and in Ken’s perspective, vendors need to educate their insurance clients on the competitive dangers they face, and the potential solutions available.