What Insurers Can Learn from the Curse of the Bambino

I can't help but think that my colleague Anthony O'Donnell's mention in yesterday's Edit Memo of the Boston Red Sox' loss in game 7 of the ALCS was meant especially for me. Anthony is well aware that I'm a lifelong Sox fan. That said, it didn't bother me too much -- the mention in yesterday's newsletter or the loss itself. Anthony was quite polite about the whole thing and, well, its tough to be upset with a baseball team that has won two World Series since 2004. In fact, the only real issue I had was with yesterday's Edit Memo was a mention of the so-called "Curse of the Bambino."It's funny. Everyone thinks that the Curse of the Bambino is something that dates back to the days of Babe Ruth -- specifically when he was sold by the Red Sox to the New York Yankees. Really though, as writers like Bill Simmons and Seth Mnookin have pointed out, the concept of the curse started with George Vecsey and was popularized by Dan Shaughnessy, a sports columnist currently writing at the Boston Globe.

Here's how Mnookin put it in his book:

"In fact, The Curse of the Bambino served as an unintentional primer on the ways in which the Boston press was able to inflict itself on players and fans alike. Forever after, every Red Sox fumble, misstep, or mistake would be attributed to a curse that had been popularized, if not largely invented, by a cantankerous sports columnist."

Before 2004 -- when the team finally won a World Series after an 86-year drought -- I often wondered whether the Red Sox were doomed not by some curse, but by a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Confidence and, maybe to a lesser extent, visualization (picturing yourself doing something before you do it) are keys to success in baseball. Perhaps a team that is used to falling short and that has been become accustomed to being "cursed" is more likely to lose.

I started thinking about that again recently, but it had nothing to do with the Sox or the Tampa Bay Rays. It had to do with a story I'm working on for the December issue of Insurance & Technology about e-payments and remote deposit capture technology. One of the recurring themes that has come up as I speak to sources for this story is that customers are expecting (and in some cases demanding) e-payment functionality from their insurer because it is a capability that is widely available in other industries such as retail and banking.

This, of course, begs the question: Why did insurers fall behind those other industries in the first place? And almost uniformly the answer I receive is some form of the following: "As I'm sure you know, the insurance industry, by its very nature, is risk-averse. Carriers have always been slow to adopt new technologies." Apparently, this is just the way it is.

The Curse of the Bambino was a concept created in 1980s and 1990s that came to represent decades of past Red Sox baseball teams. In that same spirit, I wonder if the concept of the insurance industry as a technology laggard is less historical fact and more popular opinion. After all, the insurance industry is still rife with 40-year-old legacy systems. And that tells me that, 40 years ago, insurance carriers were among the first organizations to embrace technology into their business processes.

Certainly, in 2008, it's accurate to say that, in many ways, the insurance industry lags behind other industries when it comes to technology adoption. Let's just stop assuming this is because of tradition or some deeply-seeded conservative culture that has been prevalent in the industry since the dawn of time. It's time to break another self-fulfilling prophecy.