Game on in P&C Insurance! Genpact Acquires BrightClaim | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Challenging macroeconomic conditions, demanding digitally-savvy consumers, and rising fraud are pushing P&C insurance carriers to be more demanding than ever of their service providers. Carriers not only expect optimization of cost of insurance operations, but also assistance in gaining and retaining market and customer mind share. This is forcing service providers’ hand to move from an arbitrage-first to a digital-first model.

Meanwhile, insurance BPO service providers’ origins in the arbitrage-first world and their strategic choices in large P&C product categories, such as personal lines, worked well for a while. But with the U.S. and U.K. markets maturing, service providers are being forced to reconsider their strategy. They now not only need to focus on the customer experience, their digital footprint, and lowering TCO, but also on developing deeper domain expertise to drive growth and remain differentiated in the market.

As we talked about in our report, “Property and Casualty Insurance BPO – Annual Report 2016: The Dawn of Transformational Era – Adapt and Evolve to Succeed,” this leaves them with three options to avoid falling into the no-growth trap:

  • Develop capabilities in judgment-intensive processes (i.e., trod the path taken by Third-Party Administrators, or TPAs)
  • Take the plunge to develop capabilities for handling more “exotic” P&C product categories (such as insurance of dump trucks!)
  • Explore under-penetrated (emerging) markets

Genpact (a Leader on Everest Group’s P&C insurance BPO PEAK Matrix-2017) clearly decided to pull the trigger on this conundrum, announcing on 3 May that it had acquired BrightClaim. BrightClaim’s suite of services includes property claims management (including catastrophe claims), claims adjusting, TPA services, and contents pricing services.

With this acquisition, Genpact has gained deeper domain expertise in U.S. P&C insurance claims market, and has strengthened its portfolio of digital technologies and fraud detection capabilities.

The acquisition also includes National Vendor, a BrightClaim associated company, which has a nationwide network of contractors and offers carriers a direct repair program along with content fulfillment. Genpact can leverage this to provide cost-effective and faster claims settlement services, which is expected not only to reduce claims payouts for insurers, but also to improve the customer experience.

Genpact’s top competitors in the U.S. P&C market are Cognizant and EXL. With both of them continuing to augment their capabilities and developing deep domain expertise, it was imperative for Genpact to make a move. As a favorable by-product of this acquisition, Genpact has further strengthened its onshore delivery capability with centers in Atlanta, GA and Austin, TX.

Prima facie, the deal looks accretive and has the potential to enable Genpact to challenge other Leaders in P&C insurance BPO space.

How will other providers in this segment respond? Game on! We’d say….

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