SSA & Company Announces New Insurance Product to Meet Growing Industry Demand

“The current financial turmoil has created a challenging environment for the insurance industry,” says Kaj Ahlmann, former CEO of Employers Reinsurance Corporation (a division of General Electric), and current Advisory Board member at SSA & Company. “Insurance companies need to focus on improving three keys areas: underwriting, investments, and operations. Unfortunately, today’s financial crisis has proven that many insurance companies have high-risk asset portfolios, which can only be solved through long-term changes, not short-term fixes. This, coupled with softening underwriting markets, means that the only area where insurance companies can really make an immediate, significant and lasting impact on company performance is in their operations. In short, the industry is ripe for a product that improves efficiency and reduces operating costs.”

SSA & Company developed SPM in response to feedback and input from some of the world’s leading CEOs and business thought leaders, including Jack Welch and Ram Charan. Through these discussions, the firm identified that traditional process improvement methodologies did not achieve results fast enough to meet the demands of today’s economy. In addition, SSA & Company found that old-school process methods often did not align project work with company strategy and consumed too many resources. “We saw the need for a new generation of process improvement,” says David Niles, President of SSA & Company. “So we developed SPM to address these issues. In essence, SPM applies methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma in a way that delivers results in as little as 60-90 days and achieves an ROI of 5-10x with limited upfront investment.”

Through extensive work with numerous regional and global Life & Health and P&C insurance companies, SSA & Company has tailored its SPM approach to help insurance companies address key common problem areas such as:

• Burdensome overhead costs associated with multi-product business lines and poorly integrated acquisitions
• Managing multiple operating and IT platforms
• Redundant and ineffectual outsourcing solutions
• Inaccurate billing and poor customer service
• Highly manual claims processes

“Having consulted for some of the world’s leading insurance companies, we found that there had been little innovation in the way the insurance industry addresses cost issues and margin pressure,” says John Rodgers, Managing Director of SSA & Company’s Financial Services Division. “SPM enables insurance companies to realize cost reductions while priming their operations for the future and ensures a return to sustainable growth in a very short timeframe.”

SSA & Company has already utilized its new methodology to help a number of insurance companies achieve significant results. For example, at an enterprise level, SPM enabled one of the world’s largest insurance companies to achieve more than $600 million (€437 million) in benefits over four years. Similarly, at a project level, SSA & Company utilized SPM to help another leading global multi-line insurance company reduce its policy cancellation cycle time by 50%.