Analysts Assess Insurity's AQS Acquisition

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Insurity continued its renaissance with the acquisition of AQS (Heartland, Wisc.), announced earlier this week. Insurity gained independence from LexisNexis in late 2011 when the Hartford-based Insurity was acquired by Genstar Capital.

Insurity acquired AQS principally for its customer base and its ISO rating capabilities, acknowledges Bob Larew, COO, Insurity. AQS owns the software and tools associated with Verisk's ISO Rating Service product, a relationship that will continue under the Insurity banner, as reported by I&T's Nathan Golia earlier this week.

[Insurity Acquires AQS, Citing 'Unique' ISO Relationship.]

In February Insurity announced a joint venture with MFXchange Holdings (Morristown, N.J.), a provider of hosted IT applications and outsourcing solutions, and I&T reported on Insurity's remarkable customer satisfaction turnaround, going from a score of 74 out of a possible 100 in Novarica's 2011 ACE Ranking for customer service while still within LexisNexis to a 90 in 2012.

In this article we present industry analysts' read on the significance of Insurity's acquisition of AQS to the insurance technology market.

Exemplifying Major Trends

Insurity's acquisition of AQS reflects several key trends in the insurance software business First, scale is going to be increasingly important. Bigger customer bases are providing significant advantages in terms of go-to-market momentum and resources for continuous improvement of a vendor's application portfolio. Second, insurers increasingly want vendors to provide highly integrated and componentized end-to-end solutions. This has been true for smaller and midsize insurers for years. It is starting to be true for larger insurers as well. Third, the ability to offer ISO rates, rules and forms in an easy-to-use, and easy-to-modify format has become table stakes for standard commercial lines insurers looking for new policy admin and rating systems.

[Related: Insurity as the "Madonna" of Insurance Systems.]

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio

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