A glimpse inside the personal technology arsenal and strategies that empower todays leading insurance IT professionals.
BY G. BARRY KLEIN, CPCU, CLU
There are a lot of musicians in technology, according to Fred Matteson, CIO at Firemans Fund. There is a sort of math-music connection, and a lot of musicians are good at math. Probably a lot of programmers started off as musicians and then realized they needed a day job.
Matteson just celebrated his first anniversary in his current role and, despite the fact he isnt a programmer himself, knows whereof he speaks. He did start out as a musician, getting his degree in music from the University of Arkansas and working his way through college playing gigs with various bands, including a lot of road trips. I realized I didnt want to teach music, he says, and Id already tried the performance route. So, after a stint as a communications officer in the Marines, he entered the world of business, joining AT&T in a marketing capacity. He quickly moved to the technology side and began a long career in financial services on Wall Street, mostly with Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley. He moved to the San Francisco Bay area when Schwab recruited him and spent seven years at that firm.
In 2003, while doing some consulting work for venture capital firms, he was called on to fill the CIO slot at Firemans Fund. Firemans Fund is a 140-year-old firm, he says, but it is far from being a stodgy, old insurance company. I was impressed and excited about what was happening here and felt like I had one more corporate gig left in me. He signed up for a big one.
Firemans Fund, including its McGee and Interstate National subsidiaries, writes about $4.5 billion in premium, of which 80 percent is commercial and specialty lines and 20 percent is personal lines. With a total of only 4,700 employees, 470 are IT. Part of the reason were so lean is we outsource our IT infrastructure, but mostly its because we rely entirely on our independent agency sales force to distribute our products.
Supporting and nurturing those independent agents is a major focus of the Funds new CEO, Chuck Kavitsky, to whom Matteson directly reports. (Fire-mans Fund is one of the operating units of the giant Allianz group, and Matteson participates in some Allianz-wide IT initiatives but has no cross-reporting re-sponsibilities.) Kavitsky has committed to making it easier for agents to do business with the Fund, according to Matteson, tying in to agents automation systems and speeding workflow, which has resulted in a series of initiatives. We want not only to make it desirable for an agency principal to want us to be number one or two in the agency but also to make it easy for the CSR on the front line actually to place that business with us. That, in turn, has produced some additional projects to make sure the carriers internal systems are able to turn that business around and get it issued efficiently. Many of those initiatives have to do with data.
The good news is we have a lot of data, and we know where it all is. The bad news is the same information isnt always called the same thing in different places, so were now rationalizing and normalizing that data. He notes, however, this bad news is a result of a major strength of Firemans Fund. The strength is its ability not only to write inland and ocean marine insurance (through its William H. McGee subsidiary) but to integrate the coverage into its corporate accounts.
Matteson manages his IT projects as a strategic portfolio of investments over time, including: increasing Web capabilities, mostly with agents but also internally; improving underwriting consistency, rules, and logic (the carrier writes a large number of different kinds of policies); data rationalization; and some long-term initiatives regarding policy processing.
So, what kind of automation enables Matteson to workand play? Corporately, I use the same kinds of automation our other executives use, he says, mostly my BlackBerry, which I use heavily, and my PC. But I also use automation in my personal life. That consists of some of the technology on his sailboat, named Serendipity, which he likes to take out in San Francisco Bay. It has a GPS, a chart-plotter, autopilotand a real refrigerator to keep the beer cold. But his first love, not surprisingly, is music, and his pride and joy is an Alesis QS8 professional keyboard synthesizer with internal and expandable memory. It faithfully recreates more than 500 different instruments, up to and including a grand piano. We used to have a truck to haul around all the instruments that this now replaces.
Interestingly, one lesson has emerged from all of Mattesons widely varied experiences: The right technology creates harmony both at home and at the office.
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