(Editor's note: This is the fifth and final in our series of 2013 Insurance IT All-Stars. Read articles on David Lawless of Magna Carta, Peter Settel of Homesite Insurance, Tracey Berg of West Bend Mutual, and Suren Gupta of Allstate.)

Technology is a key element of the insurance enterprise and Dan Colarusso, senior vice president, operations, and CIO for Cypress Insurance, believes it allows carriers to achieve greater efficiencies, greater levels of service, and more customer service.

“We can do a number of things that heretofore were difficult, but technology advancements will give us greater opportunities going forward,” he says.

One area of technology that caught Colarusso by surprise has been the impact social media has on the business community.

“Clearly, mobility access is no big surprise, but the whole social activity surrounding the business today—whether it be Twitter or Facebook—is becoming quite interesting from my perspective and I'm a little bit surprised by it, to tell you the truth,” he says.

As far as the insurance industry's standing within the technology universe, Colarusso points out that the nature of insurance is risk management, so it should not be a surprise that insurers IT tends to lag other industries.

“[Insurers] want to make sure the technology they are going to employ is going to give them the benefits and the stability they are going to need to meet their business objectives,” he says. “One of the things we are seeing now is the number of legacy systems and most are COBOL-driven. There aren't a lot of folks that want to be COBOL programmers today. That is a risk and it is driving companies to adopt new technology for policy administration systems. In 2014-15, I believe there will be a large number of companies moving from the legacy systems to newer client/server based systems.”

Colarusso maintains insurers need to put our arms around what mobile technology can do for the industry.

“I know there are a lot of mobile apps and lot of potential for their use so that is one area we have to give some real thought as to the type of technology, how it is implemented, and the benefits that will be derived,” he says. “By putting mobile apps in the hands of insurers in claims situations, that will enable us to give them the service they certainly deserve from us.”

Early mobile apps have been built largely by insurance IT departments, but Colarusso hopes that changes to vendor-supplied technology.

“One of the things we really need to make sure of is that we as insurance companies focus on our core—providing policy and claims coverage for our insureds,” he says. “Having to create things distracts us. I'm not sure there is a benefit there for us. I'd rather buy than build.

In April 2011, Cypress was completely outsourced in its technology operations, thanks to a BPO agreement with CSC. The company was not pleased with the high costs of maintaining those legacy systems with manual interfaces and duplicate processing among other issues.

“It was difficult to achieve the objective of capturing new business,” said Colarusso. “Platform changes were time consuming.”

Cypress made the decision to insource the activities that previously had been performed by CSC—policy administration, billing, commissions, claims, finances, and data storage and reporting. The insurer went to the market and selected MajescoMastek as the policy administration system; Great Plains as the general ledger system; CSC's advanced claims system; and CSSI to access data and put that data out to the individual users' desktop.

“It's been a complete transformation,” says Colarusso. “When we did the breakdown there were approximately 50 people from CSC supporting our account (prior to the insourcing). We've been able to reduce that by 50 percent, so we added 25 new individuals to the company, primarily in the insurance operations space. It's been a large-scale project that has touched everybody in the corporation.”

One of Colarusso's earlier positions was CIO for Mass Mutual's broker/dealer network—MML Investor Services. The CEO, Ken Rickson, explained to Colarusso that the company had $3 billion in assets under management and Rickson felt the company needed to automate as much as possible to maintain the business, provide more service to clients, and to respond to regulators.

“[Rickson's] objective, as substantiated by the chief legal officer, was to put in as much automation as we possibly could,” says Colarusso. “He said this was critical to the success of the business and he gave me the wherewithal and the funding and we were able to create some exciting applications in a short period of time.”

One application allowed MML to onboard the agents and license them. The company had more than 5,200 agents and on average they carried 10 licenses for the various jurisdictions where the trades took place.

“That was a tremendous amount of licenses that had to be adjudicated from the first of October to the first of January,” says Colarusso. “We were responsible for their licenses so we would get an invoice for over a million dollars in licenses, we would write a check for them, go ahead and license (the agents), and then get the money. It put us in a precarious position because we became bill collectors. We created an e-commerce site that allowed us to issue the license to an agent in less than four hours while the industry average was close to 30 days. We built that application in 13 weeks.”

In building his staff at Cypress, Colarusso looks for people that are creative, innovative, think differently, and “turn the cube from a standard axis.” Team leaders also need excellent communication skills, teamwork, and the ability to focus on objectives, he adds.

“I'm a true believer that IT is here for the business and the business is not here for IT,” he says. “It is our responsibility to enable the business to achieve their objectives. If we do that, we obviously achieve our objectives as well.”

The technology and the advancements Colarusso has witnessed in such a short period of time are going to continue. He feels there is a great opportunity to take those technologies and provide better service and quicker decision-making by corporations.

“Some years ago, if you used the term data warehouse they would wonder what you were talking about,” he says. “Now we are talking about Big Data, BI, and the tools to manage the business,. As we see other tools emerge from that, we will be able to take advantage of them. We see expansion of those technologies all over the place.”

Special Reports /

Insurance IT All-Star: Colarusso Sees Technology Advance the Enterprise

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