Conglomerates are power business vehicles, delivering change and diversity that can materially improve the economies of entire nations, regions and even continents. One such conglomerate, an African giant, has been particularly successful across more than 15 sectors, with ambitions to expand those as well as into new ventures.
But to do so, it needed to have tighter control and consolidation over the insurance practices of its many businesses. Thus it assigned thryve to deploy a modern risk management platform that could reach across its vast holdings.
The challenge
This specific conglomerate has a large collection of companies underneath its umbrella. These vary hugely, including real estate, food and beverages, salt, packaging, logistics, construction material and many more. Nor are these confined to one country, but spread across different geographies.
From an insurance point of view, the environment was untenable. Every business had to manage insurance requirements based on its own sector’s demands and regulations, not to mention the host country’s bespoke expectations for compliance. From a high level, this made it impossible for the conglomerate to accurately determine risk around insurance and implement mitigating policies or help the individual companies do so.
Collecting such data is onerous enough, but there was also little consistency in the information. Aggravating matters was the conglomerate’s success. It has grown very well, but that growth deepened the complexity and divides of its operations. Plans for ambitious expansions into current and new sectors were drawn up, yet a lack of consolidation – particularly around risk analysis – created barriers for this.
The requirement
Given the above scenario, the requirement is clear: the conglomerate needed to collect insurance policy and claims data in a consistent format from all of its businesses. It also wanted to enrich these engagements and collaborate with the various companies to improve their risk postures.
Such a situation needs a single place where everything happens, but one that is capable of expanding into every business securely while offering intuitive tools that the various stakeholders are willing to use. Though the conglomerate’s requirement seems simple enough, the huge variability in types of businesses, locations and reporting standards made this a big project that demanded a sophisticated yet elegant solution.
The Solution
thryve was awarded the project on the strength of its past successes, underpinned by the Riskonnect risk management information system (RMIS). Riskonnect is an industry-leading risk management platform, deployed via the cloud. This enables it to easily extend into diverse businesses, each only requiring an Internet connection to do so.
Security is a concern when going online, but Riskonnect has invested heavily in offering secure services, reinforced by thryve’s implementation skills and experience. This addressed the problem of bringing to many diverse entities into one risk management environment.
Each business has its respective processes and requirements – the reasons why reporting standards were difficult to implement. This is one of the areas where Riskonnect shines: reporting could be easily customised so that the individual companies could stick to certain standards while the platform consolidated risk information for the conglomerate itself. Normally customisation would spell doom for a technology system, but Riskonnect’s cloud profile means it can be customised to the individual user without compromising the underlying systems.
This same pedigree is why Riskonnect can be integrated with other business systems, even letting it automate policy and claims information gathering.
The Result
The immediate result for the conglomerate manifested through significant savings around its insurance premiums. It was able to realise efficiencies worth millions of dollars once it could consolidate many of its insurance premiums. Riskonnect’s ability to deploy as a service platform helped to quickly drive such efficiencies across the various entities.
Many of the customer’s businesses experienced savings of between 50% and 80% when the efficiencies of managing policies became evident. This included the automation of processes supporting both claims and premium payments. Also, numerous of the entities identified redundant systems that could be removed and add even more to savings.
Reporting has accelerated and become more nuanced, saving considerable employee work hours that are now put to more productive use. The same can be said for processing claims, including the consolidation and reconciliation of relevant information.
Overall, the combination of thryve and Riskonnect delivered modernisation and efficiencies over a broad and multi-faceted insurance landscape. Now able to rely on a single platform that improves delivery and insight around the various business policies under its umbrella, thryve’s customer is expanding the Riskonnect service to start reaping other benefits.