Insurance BPO Vendor Profile – HCL Tech BPO

With the strategic acquisition of Liberata Financial Services, regulated in UK by The Financial Services Authority (FSA), HCL has the ability to offer comprehensive end-to-end administrative services and customer services to Life & Pensions Insurers.  Key Service offerings include Agent licensing, New business/underwriting, Policy Administration, Account Administration, Commissions, Claims management and actuarial services.

HCL Practice Highlights: Top 5 Life & Pensions BPO service provider in UK, Platform based BPO service provider for Life & Pensions market, Proven capability to offer actuarial services, Dedicated Insurance Competency Center headed by Insurance experts. Gartner rates HCL’s Insurance Outsourcing Practice as “Mature” in BPO for Life and Property & Casualty Insurance

Only company to win the “Excellence in Insurance Education” award by LOMA for the 5th consecutive year. Maximum number of Advanced LOMA certified resources in practice. Key certifications are LOMA (FLMI, ACS, ARA…), AICPCU (CPCU, INS), CII (London) examinations and III-India (FIII).

HCL’s insurance practice is built on strong domain expertise with proven application and process optimization capabilities across the Quote-to-Claim cycle. HCL’s investment in product assets, intellectual property and dedicated Insurance Solution Development Centers, a strategic ecosystem of partners and strong integrated business operations capabilities help insurers address myriad of business challenges.

More than 10 clients & 8+ years experience in P&C space. FSA regulated Insurance Business Unit in UK. 1200+ people manage more than 4.6 million policies for marquee clients.

Insurance BPO Vendor Profile – Wipro BPO

Wipro’s insurance practice works with 35+ global insurers including many among the Top 500 organizations. Wipro customers include 4 of the top 6 P&C carriers in the world, 2 of the top 5 health insurance and service providers globally and 4 of the top Life, Annuity & Pension carriers in the world. Wipro is uniquely positioned to provide strategic and innovative solutions based on 3000+ person-years of experience in managing ~150Mn claims transactions annually for leading insurers.

Offerings cover the entire spectrum of the insurance value chain from Sales & Distribution, Policy Administration, Risks & compliance and claims, straddling across Life and P&C markets and delivered by over 6000+ dedicated resources. Wipro expertise in Business Advisory services, solutions and Centers of excellence reflect their commitment towards building the future of insurance. 4000+ consultants with an average experience of 10 years have delivered innovation in products, branding, marketing and pricing strategies.

Partnerships & Alliances: Camilion Solutions, eBaoTech, OneShield, Pega Systems, Prima IBCS, SAP, SSP. Associated Services (ITO + BPO Bundled Service) – Managing approximately 115MN transactions annually for their customers, Wipro is ranked amongst the top 3 in terms of volumes handled in the BPO Space.

With a client base of 140+ Health insurers and Offices spread across Atlanta - US, Monterrey - Mexico, Curitiba -Brazil, Wroclaw - Poland, Bucharest – Romania, Chengdu & Shanghai – China, Cebu City – Philippines, Yokohama - Japan, company is capable of providing multi-lingual support in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Chinese, Japanese.

Insurance BPO Vendor Profile – Infosys BPO

Infosys BPO insurance services include: Quotations, underwriting and associated compliance activities, Financial administration (e.g., premium accounting, A/R), Claims adjudication, processing and review, Policyholder servicing (amendments with and without, underwriting), Agency management, Actuarial and analytics, Documentation fulfillment.

In September 2012, Infosys BPO acquired the captive BPO unit of US-based insurance brokerage Marsh & McLennan Companies for an undisclosed sum and would add about $10-12 million ( Rs 55-66 crore) in incremental annual revenue for Infosys BPO, would involve taking over of about 87 employees. The transaction would add at least seven group life insurance clients for Infosys BPO.

McCamish Systems LLC, an Infosys BPO company, specializing in end-to-end, enterprise-wide insurance and retirement business process solutions, has increased its presence in the Voluntary Group Life Insurance business space by commencing operations in Des Moines, Iowa, USA. The unit has 87 employees, serving seven insurers and covering more than 600,000 insured lives.

Infosys acquired McCamish Systems in an all cash deal of $38 million in December 2009. McCamish Systems LLC signed a multi-year agreement with FaithLife Financial, a not-for-profit financial services organization that provides life insurance, health insurance, income protection and investment products in Canada. Phoenix Life Insurance (Hartford) has signed a multi-year agreement with McCamish Systems for selected blocks of its life insurance products, including conversion of data, policy administration and customer support. 

Insurance BPO Vendor Profile – Genpact

Genpact's life and annuity clients include several top-20 life/annuity companies, a top-three reinsurer, the retirement services and insurance divisions of major financial institutions, a top-three global broker, and efforts with LOMA and LIMRA. Genpact’s more than 14 years of global insurance experience is supported by an extensive team of certified domain experts .

Under the seven-year agreement with Ironshore, a leading provider of specialty lines insurance, Genpact will manage and standardize Ironshore's end-to-end middle- and back-office operations to increase effectiveness and productivity, allowing the insurer to focus on continued growth of their client-facing underwriting operations and further expansion into new markets.

Key Service offerings include Application to Issue (A2I) Solution,  Product Development, Sales and Marketing, Policy Administration ,Underwriting and Risk Management, Corporate Functions,agent services, actuarial analysis, underwriting support, claims processing, etc. Key insurance clients include AON, BUPA, Genworth Financial, Travelers, All State, Max New York Life Insurance,  etc. MajescoMastek and Genpact has strategic partnership focused on the insurance industry.

Genpact’s global insurance practice is driven by a team of professionals who hold over 2,800 insurance certifications, including LOMA, IIA, AAPA, FINRA Series 6, FINRA Series 7, AICPCU, and actuarial exams, of which LOMA certifications are 1,200.

Genpact’s Insurance practice has 4500+ employees providing end to end services and also has  400+ specialist staff in areas including underwriting and analytics. 

Insurance BPO Vendor Profile – WNS

WNS insurance outsourcing service offerings extend across the insurance value chain of Property and Casualty, Life, Pensions, and Annuity. Services related to Product Development, Sales & Distribution, Policy Administration, Claims Administration, Analytics, Finance & Accounting and Customer Care.

With a dedicated team of over 7,500 professionals for the insurance industry, WNS manages over 40 million claims per year helping insurers streamline their claims operations. WNS recently positioned industry 'leader' for Insurance BPO in Everest Group's  Insurance BPO PEAK Matrix.

In January 2012, Australian insurance major Suncorp gave majority portion of the order worth $220 million to WNS for end-to-end insurance outsourcing for a period of five to seven years.

WNS won a $228-million contract from UK-based Aviva in 2008 for all in-scope services related to Aviva's life & general insurance businesses in the UK and Canada. Based on the anticipated service requirements of these businesses, WNS estimates Master Services Agreement could generate $1 billion in revenues over the life of the contract. WNS also benefits from a recently signed AGS contract for approximately 580 employees with Aviva's Irish subsidiary, Hibernian.

In June 2012, WNS has acquired South Africa-based Fusion Outsourcing Services in an all cash deal of over £10 million or $15.5 million. Fusion currently employs about 1,500 people and the centre currently offers high-end voice services with plans to start financial, accounting and insurance services.

Insurance BPO Vendor Profile – EXL Service

EXL’s insurance experience is proven by 60 leading global insurance carrier clients and the tenure of more than 4,000 industry professionals and is dominant player in the US Insurance BPO Market. EXL provides high quality services and better controls support to clients allowing them to be more efficient and to better understand their customers, their markets and their risks. Clients leverage EXL’s outsourcing, analytics, advisory and risk management capabilities.

Collaborate with clients to understand their priorities & design solutions to address insurers needs and support them to manage claims, enhance subrogation services, improve first notice of loss, build compliance preparedness, improve underwriting margins, optimize loss ratios, increase customer penetration or accelerate customer reach, &  help P&C, life, annuity and health insurers become competitive.

In October 2012, EXL acquired Landacorp, a provider of software in support of clinical data exchange in the healthcare industry  and acquisition brings 15 payer clients and 50 provider clients and Landacorp has  50 million members under management on its platforms

In October 2011, EXL acquired Trumbull Services, a specialized provider of Insurance BPO services in the Property & Casualty (P&C) segment in the US, which has a ready-made technology platform to offer in  U.S. P&C Insurance BPO space and the insurance subrogation BPO business in particular. In May 2010, it acquired PDMA, the maker of LifePRO, a policy administration system in the Life Insurance BPO market deployed with 40+ insurers around the world.  

Insurance BPO Vendor Profile – TCS BPO

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has been designated as a leader in insurance BPO in the Everest Group report – PEAK Matrix. TCS is dominant in UK market through its subsidiary Diligenta.

Diligenta, UK FSA regulated subsidiary was established in 2005 to specialize in the provision of business process outsourcing (BPO) services for the UK life & pensions industry. In 2006, Diligenta secured its first £486 million deal with the Phoenix Group (formerly known as the Pearl Group). Since then, Diligenta has secured a number of new clients in the Life and Pensions sector and today administers circa 5 million policies.

TCS has over three decades of experience, partnering with over 90 regional and global insurers to achieve improved operational efficiencies, reduced costs and customer / partner satisfaction and  services span all insurance segments - life, healthcare, property and casualty (general insurance) as well as annuities, pensions and retirement, and span the complete life cycle.

Recently concluded a multi-year, multi-million dollar transformation project at Phoenix Group, the UK’s largest specialist consolidator of closed life funds that involved replacing and decommissioning 11 major life and pension administration systems, hundreds of peripheral systems and migrating more than four million policies and customer records, across multiple brands and product lines into TCS BaNCS Insurance.

TCS won its second-biggest outsourcing contract worth $2.2 billion from UK based pension firm Friends Life, based on a model wherein the company will be paid for each insurance transaction and will add another 3.2 million policies. 

Global Insurance BPO Market 2012

The global insurance BPO market has been valued at US$2 billion by the end of 2012. and segment grew by 17% annually. Third-party Business Process Services (BPS) in the insurance industry currently a US$6-8 billion market growing at ~17% annually.

Post 2008 Financial crisis there had been a stable growth in the number of contracts signed in both the Life & Pensions (L&P) and Property & Casualty (P&C) lines. In fact the contracts almost doubled in number when compared to 2008-2009 when the financial crisis had a severe impact on the insurance companies. BPS in insurance rebounded with 53 new, publicly-announced contracts signed in 2010-2011.

United States and United Kingdom are the primary markets for Indian Insurance BPO vendors, but the market is also going global and activity is picking up in other regions of the world too. Asia Pacific showed significantly increased activity over the last one to two years .

Insurers expect BPO as a key tool to cut costs, improve operations, and manage regulations. Service providers are differentiating their offerings through better technology, strong delivery capabilities, and the ability to serve niche segments.

The 2012 insurance BPO PEAK Matrix has three:

1. Leaders (EXL Service, TCS, and WNS)

2. Major Contenders (Genpact, HCL, Infosys, and Wipro)

3. Emerging Players (Capgemini, Cognizant, and Serco) 

4. Leaders control 60% of the overall insurance BPO market in revenue terms with healthy growth rate.

5. EXL Service is dominant player in the U.S. BPO insurance market.

6. TCS dominant in the UK BPO insurance market

Industry-specific BPO accounts for over 60% of BPO contracts in insurance, spanning product development and business acquisition, new business, policy servicing and reporting, and claims processing.

Leaders have a wide scale of operations and have a significant advantage over Major Contenders and Emerging Players. Capabilities of the major players differ not only in terms of the variance of the service offerings but also in terms of the Geographies they are servicing successfully.

Leaders and Major Contenders have built delivery capabilities from various different locations and this global delivery presence is a big competitive advantage when compared to Emerging Players.

The five themes identified Everest group are Platform-based BPO offerings, increasing focus on the U.S. closed books BPO market, inclusion of complex processes in insurance BPO contracts, higher degree of on shoring, and regulatory and risk management BPO. 

Source: Everest Group.

 1. https://research.everestgrp.com/Product/11922  

2. https://research.everestgrp.com/Product/11946

Global SaaS Market growth will continue & drive software sales growth in 2013

Worldwide Software as a Service (SaaS) Market is expected to continue its growth in 2013 as more and more businesses are adopting SaaS and most of the Independent Software Vendors (ISV) including the big vendors like IBM, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, etc. have increased their product offerings in the SaaS segment. There has also been a spate of acquisitions in the SaaS segment where ISVs acquired specialist small and medium SaaS vendors and product developers and integrated acquired software and product offerings into their core products. The SaaS software market will increase 25 percent in 2013 to $59 billion, a 25 percent increase. In 2014, the market is expected to total $75 billion, according to Forrester Research. Gartner predicts the size of the SaaS market will grow from $16 billion in 2012 to more than $21 billion in 2015. Mark Hurd, President of Oracle has said that cloud computing services will reach $72.5 billion over the next five years from 2010 levels of $21.5 billion and estimates that by 2014 around 14 million more jobs will be created due to cloud computing.

In June and July of 2012, Gartner conducted a survey of 556 organizations across 10 countries and within four regions (North and South America, Europe and Asia/Pacific) which highlighted 71 percent of organizations have been using SaaS for less than three years. According to the survey, investments in SaaS are expected to increase across all regions. Seventy-seven percent of respondents expected to increase spending on SaaS, while 17 percent plan to keep spending the same. More than 80 percent of respondents in Brazil and Asia/Pacific indicated more spending on SaaS applications over the next two years. The U.S. and European countries were not far behind with 73 percent of U.S. respondents and 71 percent of European respondents intending to increase spending on SaaS. Gartner Research vice president Charles Eschinger said despite the fact that adoption of on-demand deployment model by business organizations has begun more than a decade ago, but SaaS popularity has increased significantly within the past five years. This rise in adoption in the past few years is because the development of the SaaS technology and maturity of the SaaS business and computing models that led to diminishing of business concerns related to security, response time and service availability.

Gartner survey also highlighted that customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise content management (ECM) as the applications most often being newly deployed. Supply chain management (SCM), Web conferencing, teaming platforms and social were the applications picked most as replacements for on-premises solutions. But the business decision to migrate to SaaS depends on business criticality of the application/solution along with other critical factors like geography, business agility, usage scenario and IT architecture and few organizations will completely migrate to SaaS but with a mix of SaaS and traditional on-premises application deployment models, according to Gartner’s Eschinger. Another fact is that integrating SaaS tools to existing IT infrastructure is both costly and complex and IT departments have to work closely with SaaS vendors in terms of planning and migration to SaaS platforms. But overall SaaS adoption by business organization even by large organizations will continue to rise and is one of the key revenue generators for Independent Software Vendors for the next few years.  

Healthcare BPO – Medical Coding, Billing and Transcription India 2012

The total value of the U.S. healthcare business process outsourcing market is about $38 billion, according to Sutherland. According to industry data, demand for healthcare outsourcing services has been growing at a pace of about 25-35 per cent every year over the last few years. Healthcare provider outsourcing has the highest growth rate of 31.9% from 2013 to 2018 because of the conversion from ICD-9 coding system to ICD-10 coding system to be implemented by October 2014 in the US. Provider outsourcing capabilities are Medical billing, Medical coding and Medical transcription. Medical Billing is the major process outsourced by the providers from the US market and Claims processing is the dominating outsourcing process for the Payor market. U.S. is the largest source of outsourcing, followed by Europe. The most preferred destination is India in payer and provider outsourcing. Philippines is an upcoming destination making its mark in payer and provider outsourcing. Medical Transcription is a US$ 18 billion industry growing at 15% every year and is expected to reach US$ 20-25 billion in next five years.

India has advantages when compared to the other outsourcing destinations such as has availability of high number of healthcare professionals, affordable cost of living, large patient pool, and decreased time and cost of recruitment. The skill sets for this sector demands graduates in Life Sciences with a specialization in biology, microbiology, physical therapy, biochemistry and nursing for the medical coding space. The data entry segment looks for not just typing skills but candidates with analytical abilities. The voice based assignments call for graduates with excellent communication skills.  India has now established itself as an outsourcing destination of choice for the medical coding work, which is a complicated process. Over the last two years, more and more of the in-patient coding work is being outsourced to India and is by far the most complex coding work. Medical Billing & Coding is the process of submitting and following up on claims to insurance companies in order to receive payment for services rendered by a healthcare provider. Medical transcription, also known as MT, is an allied health profession, which deals in the process of transcription, or converting voice-recorded reports as dictated by physicians or other healthcare professionals, into text format. (Source: Wikipedia)

Medical Coding and Billing have evolved into complex process due to the change from ICD-9 coding to ICD-10 coding mechanism which is much more detailed in its Code-sets, stresses the need for clinical documentation to be precise in order to get accurate payments. Many Providers also recognized the extent of revenue loss incurred due to poor documentation based on the past claims data and poor documentation also created problems during audits which led to revenue losses too. The next few years there is good opportunity for growth in this segment and large Indian players too are looking at this segment but this segment is predominantly dominated by small specialist players only. Medical Transcription outsourcing projects to India started nearly 15 years ago and many companies have been successful in servicing the US clients with the availability of the skilled talent pool and labor arbitrage as the cost is very less in India. Most of the Indian BPO vendors offer the medical coding and transcription services and are also looking to acquire companies in this segment as evident with M&A activity in Healthcare BPO segment.