On Groucho Marxs long-running quiz show, You Bet Your Life, a scruffy duck dropped from overhead with a $100 reward in its beak if a contestant said the magic word. The audience was clued in to the word from the start of each show.
The magic word in the insurance industry at this juncture is transparency, and if Grouchos program were on now, the audience could consist of any insurance customer. Each one would be clued in to the need for transparency, especially after watching the misconduct of industry behemoths, including Marsh & McLennan, Aon, and AIG, and the rise of regulatory requirements, such as Sarbanes-Oxley. The contestants would be the insurers themselves, playing for their continued existence.
With all that has transpired, however, insurers should be clued in, too. Their future could depend upon iteven more so in todays growth-oriented environment that relies on customer relationships and favors initiatives to broaden distribution (see Best of Both Worlds, p. 16, for the technology that supports this). In fact, although a TowerGroup 2005 spending forecast predicts relatively flat insurance IT spending overall, most of the action, the firm asserts, will reside on the P&C side, with distribution taking one of the top three IT investment spots for the year.
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