2010 Celent Insurance CIO Surveys
2009/12/17
It is at this time of the year that Celent conducts its famous surveys providing useful insights about insurers preoccupations, priorities and plans for the coming year. This year we have decided to apply the same usual method for the United States market. In other words, our readers will be able to access our famous US insurance CIO survey report in late January. On the European front, we have decided to get a more focused look at two countries. Indeed, Celent is currently conducting interviews with CIOs in United Kingdom and in France and we will publish a specific report for each country. I am personally dealing with France and so far, the main concerns of French CIOs are the following:
- Distribution: French CIOs understand that the distribution landscape is changing fast. They have all listed distribution as one of their priorities for 2010 and most of them intend to launch IT initiatives to take advantage of the growing importance of online insurance notably.
- Regulation: the Solvency II regulation framework affects directly insurers IT investment priorities. As the results of the quantitative impact study 4 launched by the CEIOPS in 2008 tend to demonstrate, there is a growing interest by French insurers in understanding what are the impacts of the new set of prudential regulation not only on their solvency ratios but also on their ability to comply with the other elements of the regulation. Some insurers have already invested in new IT systems for instance capital modeling tools but some others still need to understand what they have to start with and what they need to focus on to be ready in 2012.
- Improvement of core processes and cost reduction. Even though most of the CIOs interviewed so far clearly mentioned they had not really implemented drastic measures (layoff program, IT investments cancellation, etc.) following the financial crisis and the economic downturn, improvement of core processes leading to cost reduction via a smarter use of IT resources represents a priority for 2010.