Dear Arun Jain, Chairman and CEO of Polaris Software Lab:
Congratulations on your successful acquisition of SEEC! Congratulations also on the success of Polaris over the years. From your beginnings with Citigroup in India, you have accomplished much. Though your company background is banking, you have also achieved success in insurance even before the acquisition of SEEC. You have much of which to be proud.
As you know, SEEC has achieved visibility in the insurance industry with its unique approach and its support of ACORD and SOA. Those of us who care about the success of the insurance technology industry are hoping that this merger between your companies will bring more resources – talent, time, and treasure – to SEEC customers and prospects. We know that Polaris has confined it strategic focus to what we in the U.S. call financial services (insurance, banking, and securities) – what you in India call BFSI: banking, financial services, and insurance. We see that as positive because disciplined focus can bring about better results.
A focus such as your, however, is narrow in one sense, and yet broad in another. Two notable banking technology firms in the U.S. (Fiserv and Jack Henry) decided to expand into insurance (ten and five years ago, respectively). It seemed to many observers a natural extension of interests. After years of trying, however, both of these firms recently began withdrawing from insurance and returning to a more exclusive focus on banking (Fiserv by divesting 51% of its insurance assets and Jack Henry by divesting 100% of its insurance assets). They found the synergies between a banking focus and an insurance focus elusive. For more detail see my posts on this blog from a few months ago: Financial Services Divergence and Insurance Technology v. Banking Technology.
We remind you of these examples not because we think you will fail to be strong in insurance, but because we hope that you will succeed in being strong in insurance. Insurance stands to gain more from improvements in technology deployment than almost any other industry. Its fundamental product is intangible and its current applications of technology are dated in many instances. Polaris can participate in great innovation and productivity gains if it is thoroughly committed to the insurance industry. Lukewarm commitments to serving the insurance industry seldom prevail. The industry is too complex and arcane to be served well by any other than fully-committed suppliers.
So here is wishing you the best of success with SEEC. May Polaris be an important part of helping the insurance industry become what it can be: the world’s most innovative user of technology in the 21st century (because it wasn’t always in the 20th).
Tags: banking, Fiserv, Insurance technology, Jack Henry, Polaris, SEEC
