The International Insurance Society (IIS) announced that Frank O’Halloran, chief executive officer of Sidney-based QBE Insurance Group, is the 2010 Insurance Hall of Fame winner. IIS noted that Mr. O’Halloran was directly responsible for over 125 acquisitions by the QBE Group over the last 20 years with the takeover of the Elders’ insurance business in Australia the latest acquisition in QBE’s growth strategy.
“QBE’s growth under Frank O’Halloran’s leadership is nothing short of remarkable, both in terms of returns and global expansion,” said a statement from Michael J. Morrissey, IIS president and CEO. “I congratulate him on receiving the highest award in insurance, an honor he truly deserves.”
QBE has been a high-profit performer and now ranks in the 25 largest insurers in the world with operations in 45 countries driving three-quarters of its revenue from outside Australia, IIS said. The firm has weathered the recession by diversification of products, geographical exposure and conservative investments, and market capitalization has soared over $22.5 billion.
The Insurance Hall of Fame was created in 1957 and is administered by the IIS, which was founded in 1965 as a nonprofit corporation. IIS describes itself as the largest multinational organization of its kind with almost 900 corporate and individual members from more than 90 countries.
Click here for the original article at Property-Casualty.com.
QBE Regional Insurance, a unit of QBE the Americas, has named Andy Doll to lead its commercial lines operations. Doll previously served as vice president and chief actuary of commercial insurance for Fireman’s Fund, and before that spent 11 years at General Casualty/Winterthur Insurance Group in several roles, including assistant vice president of commercial lines and chief actuary. His new title is commercial lines senior vice president.
New services and applications make digital content, applications and services available in an integrated, personalised way to users via a diverse range of devices and access networks. New services are equally accessible through wireless networks to mobile phones, through corporate LANs to PCs, or by broadcast to digital television.
All the major players in the industry are investing significant amounts of time and money in transforming the global data network that we call the Internet, into a pervasive medium that connects users to personalised universes of dynamic content, applications and services, via any smart, connected device. The consequent changes will be profound:
• applications as we think of them today will no longer be built. Pervasive computing applications will be collections of co-operating e-services that deliver personalised groups of functions to support users’ own favourite activities – the way they like them
• devices will be disaggregated. New modularised personal computing platforms, enabled by new technologies, will be composed and re-composed dynamically by users as they move between different locations and roles.
This vision of the ‘next-generation’ is a long way from what the Internet is today – a medium for transporting messages and relatively static web content between traditional PC computing platforms. It is truly a paradigm shift.
New initiatives
Pervasive Internet initiatives are already being explored by both suppliers and corporate users. For suppliers, the main drivers are:
• the threats of commoditisation and increased competition from globalisation and deregulation
• the opportunity to sell existing assets (or incremental enhancements to these) to new markets
• the opportunity for competitive differentiation through the provision of high-value services.
Corporate users of pervasive computing technology are interested in making their corporate IT systems and applications pervasive. Corporate pervasive computing technology users’ main reasons for exploring pervasive computing opportunities are their desire to reduce operational costs and increase company productivity.
Consumer interest in access to applications, services and content through new smart, connected devices is another major factor in market development. Consumer interest is being driven by three factors:
• increased mobility of workforces and consumers in general
• the increasing expectation in many developed countries (largely driven by past technology innovations) of 24-hour service availability – whether the service in question is a local shop, a television programme or a website
• general interest in the Internet (largely driven by ISP and merchant advertising), combined with an antipathy (by some) to personal computers.
Expect fundamental change
The emerging pervasive movement will prove as disruptive to the IT software and hardware industries as the client-server movement of the early 1990s. Moreover, it will affect the broadcast media and telecommunication industries equally significantly – something which the client-server movement never did.
Change in access networks and devices:
Different access platforms vary widely in their capabilities, and will continue to do so even when and if the current technology constraints (such as battery technology and access network bandwidth) are removed. In the future, soft constraints – primarily, the usage contexts in which people like to use devices – will play much greater roles in determining the variation in device capabilities and form factors.
Change in content, applications and services:
Today’s ‘uni-channel’ (for example, web-based, TV-based or phone-based) applications will gradually be replaced by integrated multichannel applications. Despite the considerable investments on the behalf of service providers that are required to make this transition, there is considerable pressure from the application and content-provision communities, and device-manufacturer communities to move forward. Specialisation of content, applications and services according to a user’s location, access platform type, preferences, language and so on will become the norm for new offerings.
Change in industry structures:
Moves at both the tops and bottoms of the main supply chains that are contributing towards the pervasive computing movement – IT, public telecommunications and broadcast media – are enabling service providers of all kinds to consider developing and delivering multichannel services. However, delivery of these new services brings complex challenges to industries. Increasingly, players (possibly from multiple industries) will have to co-operate online, possibly with competitors, to enable the services that users want.
This online co-operation cannot happen without information sharing, to enable the sharing of revenues and responsibility for quality-of-service. Technology has an enabling part to play in addressing both these issues, but it is not the whole answer. There are many geographical and market issues that need to be addressed by suppliers: and suppliers can only address these issues through partnerships, to fill gaps in their expertise and execution capabilities.
In the field of commerce, the specialist area of business development comprises a number of techniques and responsibilities which aim at gaining new customers and at penetrating existing markets. Techniques used include:
* assessment of marketing opportunities and target markets
* intelligence gathering on customers and competitors
* generating leads for possible sales
* advising on, drafting and enforcing sales policies and processes
* follow-up sales activity
* formal proposal or presentation management and writing
* pitch and presentation rehearsals
* business model design
Business development involves evaluating a business and then realizing its full potential, using such tools as:
* marketing
* information management (sometimes conflated with knowledge management)
* customer service
A sound organization aiming to withstand competitors never stops business development[citation needed], but engages in it as an ongoing process.
Successful business development often requires a multi-disciplinary approach beyond just “a sale to a customer”. Some consultants[who?] frequently recommend a detailed strategy for growing a business in desirable ways, which may involve financial, legal and advertising skills. Business-development practitioners cannot reduce their activities to simple templates applicable to all or even most situations faced by real-world enterprises. Creativity in meeting new and unforeseen challenges may help sustainable growth.
Business-development roles may have one of two modes:
1. sales-oriented (client-facing); or
2. an operational function to support sales.
In a sales role, business development could concentrate on developing strategic-channel relationships or on general sales. This emerges from analysis of the varied job descriptions found in job-search engines, especially in the UK. In the US, the term “capture management” appears as an alternative job or role title, typically used when describing business development as an operational function to support the selling function of a company. The Association of Proposal Management Professionals have produced the “Capture Management Lifecycle” that describes the process in three broad stages:
1. pre-bid phase
2. bid phase
3. post-bid phase
Small to medium-sized companies often do not establish procedures for business development, instead relying on their existing contacts. Or people in such companies may assume that because they know people in high places that this will solve any business-development problems and that somehow new financial transactions will come to them. Such thinking can have significant ramifications if one cannot exploit those relationships, which very often[citation needed] remain personal or weak. Such a situation may result in no new sales in the pipeline.
Business-development professionals frequently have had earlier experience in financial services, investment banking or management consulting; although many find their route to this area by climbing the corporate ladder in functions such as operations management or sales. Skillsets and experience for business-development specialists usually consist of a mixture of the following (depending on the business requirements):
The “pipeline” refers to flow of potential clients which a company has started developing. Business-development staff assign to each potential client in the pipeline a percent chance of success, with projected sales-volumes attached. Planners can use the weighted average of all the potential clients in the pipeline to project staffing to manage the new activity when finalized. Enterprises usually support pipelines with some kind of CRM (customer relationship management) tool or CRM-database, either web-based (such as the salesforce.com software-as-a-service solution) or an in-house system. Sometimes business development specialists manage and analyze the data to produce sales management information (MI). Such MI could include:
* reasons for wins/losses
* progress of opportunities in relation to the sales process
* top performing salespeople/sales channels
* sales of services/products
For larger and well-established companies, especially in technology-related industries, the term “business development” often refers to setting up and managing strategic relationships and alliances with other, third-party companies. In these instances the companies may leverage each others’ expertise, technologies or other intellectual property to expand their capacities for identifying, researching, analyzing and bringing to market new businesses and new products, business-development focuses on implementation of the strategic business plan through equity financing, acquisition/divestiture of technologies, products, and companies, plus the establishment of strategic partnerships where appropriate.