Former Setanta Insurance CEO Mike Matthews has unveiled a newly enlarged insurance consultancy aimed at helping insurance and non-insurance clients meet the challenges of a rapidly changing market.
Sevitt Group now comprises three separate companies – Sevitt Consulting, Sevitt Management and Sevitt Technologies – and will target potential clients in the UK, Ireland and United States. Clients can choose to work with one of the companies or, if the project demands it, a combination of the three.
From its offices in Dublin, London and Manchester, Sevitt Group is looking to work on projects with a range of insurance sector clients including brokers, underwriting agencies, and life and non-life insurers, as well as non-insurance commercial clients and industry groupings looking for the best business processes and bespoke insurance solutions.
Sevitt Consulting, which has worked with a wide range of clients since 2003, carries out detailed feasibility studies to assess the viability of a range of traditional and alternative risk funding structures, such as captives, for non-insurance clients as well as analysing suitable business solutions to maximise underwriting profits and reduce operating costs from the insurance process for insurance clients.
The consulting side of the business also provides strategic advice to insurance and non-insurance boards of management including being retained in a non-executive director role by insurance clients where there is a need for ongoing advice and support.
Sevitt Technologies is a joint venture with CTI Digital, a leading full service digital agency with considerable experience working in the insurance sector.
CTI Digital’s CEO Nick Rhind joins Sevitt Technologies as Technical Director, enabling Sevitt Group to provide a unique proposition harnessing strategic insurance and IT project management.
Mike Matthews said: “We put in place proven advisory and flexible project management, assembling and managing the right project team drawn from an established network of global business partners including actuaries, insurers, reinsurers and insurance managers. We then add to this the ability to provide early-stage implementation and management services with the access to an in-house specialist technology division to deliver and support a client’s technology requirements.
“The industry has to confront a plethora of issues including merger and acquisition activity, consolidation, operational challenges and questions of legacy.
“We see our expanded services as not just helping businesses combat challenges they are facing today, but helping them to future-proof their organisations.”
Matthews said that he expected to do a lot of work on business processes management and reporting around the EU’s Solvency II regulations, due to come into force in 2014.
He said: “Insurers that can consistently and accurately access, manage, analyse and monitor portfolio data in real-time will be able to deploy capital in a more flexible and decisive manner leading to lower solvency capital requirements, controlled underwriting profits and increased shareholder value. Such insurers will flourish under the new regulatory regime and those that don’t – or can’t – will struggle.
“Historically, business processes and data management to this level and degree of flexibility is an area where the insurance industry has consistently underperformed.”
Matthews added that the insurance industry was also continuing to change in a number of other ways.
“The way insurance has traditionally been bought and sold is changing. Today’s Facebook generation expect high levels of automation, 24/7 communication and seamless connectivity as a way of life,” he said.
“The commercial insurance market will undergo a revolution during the next decade in terms of how it is priced, traded and serviced. Technological advances will enable the automated and direct writing of up to 80 per cent of SME business via new online channels and, while larger risks will continue to use broker services these will also be increasingly traded electronically in the years ahead.”
Sevitt Group has already been appointed to deliver a range of complex and bespoke client projects in 2012 with a number of proposals out with potential clients.
Matthews said: “We are working on a significant number of varied and complex projects focussed on reorganising businesses, embracing technology, looking at data management to aid profitability and the development of bespoke products to give our clients a competitive edge.”
Matthews resigned from his position as CEO of Setanta Insurance in July last year after investors failed to back his vision to grow the business within Ireland and internationally. Setanta Insurance had originally appointed Sevitt and Matthews to create, launch and then manage the insurance start-up in 2006.
Matthews went on to successfully grow Setanta Insurance over a four year period, culminating in the company winning a number of prestigious industry awards. Among these awards was the Irish Broker Awards’ Best Commercial Vehicle Product in 2010 and 2011, a market-leading product which had been designed by Sevitt Consulting for the company.
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