While some are still wringing their hands about Satyam, Wipro has announced that it has developed and will market a software-based solution called Insurance Claims Analytics (ICA). This business intelligence solution is designed for P&C carriers, and is expected to be followed by other solutions for the insurance market. This move, of course, takes Wipro beyond its bread-and-butter business of providing people to execute processes and into the field of providing proprietary technology.
Wipro is not the first Indian outsourcing company to take such a tack, nor even the first to do it in insurance. That distinction probably goes to Majesco Mastek whose chairman, Sudhakar Ram, formulated and began executing this strategy several years ago. He believed that proprietary software was an important weapon to add to his competitive arsenal. Wipro is a far larger company, however, and its move in this direction sets up some interesting possibilities.
It’s natural that Indian firms would take advantage of the business process knowledge they’ve gained from the work they’ve been doing for insurers. To leverage the domain expertise they’ve gained as a result of aggressively growing their operations is a wise move on their part. On the other hand, it will be interesting to see how other competitors respond – will everyone step up their game? The insurance industry should benefit from the heightened competition that will occur.
It will also be interesting to see if the Indian firms are willing to develop software that reduces process steps, automates processes, and, as a consequence, reduces the headcounts required to execute an insurer’s business processes. After all, the Indian outsourcers have grown their revenues by “adding seats.” If this new revenue stream of proprietary software reduces seats, will the owners be as aggressive in pushing it? It’s not easy for any company to alter its business model or do anything that might cannibalize its core business.
Of course, it’s much too early in the game to wonder whether an analytics solution like ICA is going surface all these issues. But if the major Indian outsourcers are going this direction of converting their ever-increasing domain expertise to technology solutions, we’ll see some of the answers in the next few years.
Tags: insurance software, Insurance technology, Majesco Mastek, Satyam, Sudhakar Ram, Wipro
