Donald Light, Director of Americas Property/Casualty Practice
This event is free to attend for Celent clients, flex-plan clients, and the media. For more information, please contact Chuck Smith at 1-617-262-3125 or csmith@celent.com .
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As part of our research, Celent has been covering a large variety of vendors active in the insurance space. Over the past 6 months we have published a few reports profiling specific core insurance system vendors in different application domains such as policy administration, claims, underwriting and quote and illustration. Based on our continuous screening of the market we have a pretty good understanding of this market:
In Europe, Middle East and Africa we have noticed that the market is highly fragmented and we think that a concentration phase will decrease the number of market participants over the next decade. Mergers and acquisitions activities have already started with some interesting strategic moves that happened over the past 5 years such as the acquisition of Duck Creek by Accenture, IDIT and FIS Software by Sapiens and the merger between FJA and COR AG.
More recently we have seen software integrators or more generally what Celent calls IT services vendors getting more active on the M&A front with for instance MphasiS purchasing Wyde a few years ago. As we are about to kick off the update of our IT Services vendor reports from 2010 (for more information about these reports you can click on the following links: IT Services Vendors Solutions Spectrum: North American Version, 2010 and IT Services Vendors Solutions Spectrum: EMEA Version, 2010), we already have noticed that some IT services firms are getting very aggressive on the market. A good example is without any doubts Sopra who has had an acquisition fever over the past 3 years with the recent acquisition of Steria announced this week.
We find the recent M&A developments in the core insurance system vendor area as well as the IT services vendor industry interesting. We think it demonstrates that IT in financial services and more specifically in insurance attracts interests from investors, being existing players or new ones. In this fast changing environment, we are looking forward to get a deep dive in the IT services vendor landscape in order to provide the latest about this market to our insurance subscription clients. Stay tuned!
Senior Vice President of Insurance, Jamie Macgregor and Senior Insurance Analyst, Nicolas Michellod
This event is free to attend for Celent clients, flex-plan clients, and the media. For more information, please contact Chris Williams at 44-208-870-7875 or cwilliams@celent.com .
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No no – I’m not referring to an animated cat on an App but rather the announcement yesterday regarding the Heartbleed bug affecting the security of over 50% of the Internet according to some estimates.
The bug affects the OpenSSL package and is believed to have been in the package since 2011. It affects the way the package deals with heart beat messages, hence the moniker given to the bug. There are already tools in use that exploit the bug and provide access to recent user data on compromised servers.
There have been security alerts before with many large brands facing fines and media inquiries about their losses but this bug potentially affects hundreds of thousands of websites and many businesses globally, but why characterise this as a catastrophe and why would insurers be interested?
In the last 2 to 3 years with the cost of data breaches growing significantly businesses have been offsetting the risk of a breach or loss through Cyber Liability Insurance Covers. Whilst the practice and cover is arguably in it’s infancy it’s popularity suggests that this sort of event could constitute a significant liability to insurers globally offering this cover. Further the event has some characteristics in common with other events requiring catastrophe response:
There are some significant differences here though. Most notably in the event of hail, storm or flooding the insured are likely aware if their assets are affected or not – they may not know the extent of the loss but are likely aware if they need to claim. Increasingly risk aggregation and modelling tools are helping carriers and brokers understand the likely impact of catastrophe events. In this case however the insured may not be aware if they are compromised or not since the bug allowed for intrusions that would not be logged by the affected systems. In this case the advice is to determine if OpenSSL is used and if so then the server has been vulnerable, may have been compromised and should be patched immediately.
The full statement regarding the bug is available at http://heartbleed.com/ although it is also covered at http://ift.tt/PYLt6O which contains some useful advice. Further coverage is available from Reuters and The Guardian.
As noted on heartbleed.com – Apache and NGinx webservers are known to typically use the OpenSSL library and account for 66% of the Internet according to Netcraft’s April 2014 Web Server Survey.
Google says that it is not affected however Yahoo has already reported that they are working to fix the affected services on their side.
As always communication and collaboration is crucial to managing these events. Insurer clients of Celent may like to read Celent’s case study combining internal and external data to respond to a catastrophe.
