{"id":1178,"date":"2014-02-05T12:51:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-05T12:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/projects\/horsesforsources\/insurance-bpo-winnerscircle_020514\/"},"modified":"2014-02-05T12:51:00","modified_gmt":"2014-02-05T12:51:00","slug":"insurance-bpo-winnerscircle_020514","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/insurance-bpo-winnerscircle_020514\/","title":{"rendered":"Five make Winner’s Circle for Insurance BPO: Accenture, Genpact, EXL, IBM and TCS"},"content":{"rendered":"

The insurance BPO market will hit $5 billion this year, growing at a 5% clip and has proven to be one of the select verticals truly embracing technology enabled BPO capability to support operations. \u00a0The insurance market has become incredibly competitive in recent years, with the differentiation across insurers moving to customer service and brand perception, once price points are relatively similar across the reputable firms.<\/p>\n

In short, these insurance firms need to invest every cent they can in their advertising intensity and customer facing capability to keep ahead in this market. \u00a0And with advertising costs becoming so immense for the firms operating on wafer thin margins for many insurance products, they have no choice but to find cost efficiencies from elsewhere in the organization to pay for it all, if they are really going to save you 15% or more in a 15 minute phone call…<\/p>\n

For the large insurers, many could go out of business if it wasn’t for the savings and efficiencies generated by maturing BPO delivery models. \u00a0So let’s take a look at the industry’s first meaningful analysis of the innovation and execution capabilities of all the leading service providers:<\/p>\n

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Click to Enlarge<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

HfS has evaluated the innovation and execution capabilities of service providers catering to life and annuities (L&A) and property and casualty (P&C) insurers, brokers, reinsurers and others (excluding healthcare). \u00a0We asked Research Director leading the blueprint initiative, Reetika Joshi<\/a>, to elaborate further on the results of the exhaustive study.<\/p>\n

Reetika, what are the key challenges facing insurers today?<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

The key challenges global insurers in our study face are regulatory compliance, member retention, reducing total cost to service, integration efforts for aggressive acquisitions, multi-line agency management, profitable growth in new markets (esp. for L&A), pricing pressure (esp. for P&C) and most importantly, risk management. Our conversations with these insurers and their service providers, along with exhaustive secondary research reveal the changing mindset of buyers in this industry. Insurance clients\u2019 outsourcing motivations are slowly starting to change, going from task outsourcing and optimization to impacting total cost to serve, cost of compliance, organization level efficiency and insight generation \u2013 in line with core organizational challenges.<\/p>\n

How are service providers adding value beyond basic low cost staff augmentation?<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Clients are increasingly looking to their service providers to help them with these business outcomes (part of what HfS calls \u201cprogressive outsourcing\u201d) which goes beyond traditional, transactional \u201clights-on outsourcing\u201d. Insurers are continuing to expand the scope of their processes with service providers to include more high-value, complex and core functions such as actuarial and underwriting support, agency network optimization and analytics across areas such as new product, risk and claims. However, service provider capabilities in these service areas are not consistent. Clients are more willing to entrust execution of complex processes to market leading service providers. Further, the delay in decision making around closed block administration outsourcing is starting to give way to a host of new contracts in the last two years. North American insurers are the source for the vast majority of these deals since 2011.<\/p>\n

Our research sizes the global insurance BPO market at $4.72 billion<\/strong> in 2013<\/strong>, growing at a CAGR of 4.6%<\/strong> to reach $6.19 billion<\/strong> in 2018<\/strong>. For the scope of this study, we have excluded the traditional third party administrator (TPA)\/loss adjustment segments as we believe the competitive dynamics of the outsourcing provider group is unique.<\/p>\n

So how did they winners shake out?<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Winner\u2019s Circle Features a Mix of Provider Groups and Strategies. <\/strong>The leaders in our analysis represent a diverse mix of strategies and strengths:<\/p>\n

The leaders in our analysis represent a diverse mix of strategies and strengths:<\/p>\n