Bugs, also referred to as software vulnerabilities, are flaws that can be abused to cause a system or software to have unintended behaviors that disclose sensitive information, negatively impact availability, or provide unauthorized access. These bugs are what malicious hackers use to successfully achieve their after-action goals in a long kill chain of steps. Thus, the life cycle of a vulnerability to active exploitation can be described as starting with vulnerability researchers’ or malicious hackers’ discovery of a bug in a software or application, and if the bug is found by a malicious hacker, the active exploitation of the bug in the "wild" until the manufacturer or developer creates a fix or patch that renders the exploit ineffective.
Business intelligence (BI) has become a popular tool among insurers in the last ten years, and interest is only growing. Novarica’s IT Budgets and Projects report shows that both P/C and L/H/A carriers are prioritizing investments in BI and analytics. There’s untapped potential for insurers’ BI initiatives: Most carriers are still working with only basic analytics capabilities.
While insurers across all lines of business have similar priorities and challenges, there are some differences between life/annuity projects and property/casualty initiatives. In general, P/C insurers are more confident in their systems’ capabilities than L/A insurers are. L/A insurers are facing changing customer expectations while managing continued margin pressure in their legacy blocks of business. This means insurers in this space are prioritizing digital efforts, operating efficiency, and workflow optimization.
Robert Pick, SVP & CIO, Tokio Marine North America Services, leads a team of over 800 with full-suite technology responsibilities across enterprise architecture and applications, user services, analytics, digital, and security. Before Tokio Marine, Mr. Pick was senior executive director for technology at Condé Nast and principal consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers’ enterprise technology integration practice. Among other board positions, Mr. Pick serves on the executive steering committee for Capgemini’s World InsurTech Report.
What are your some of your top priorities for the next 6-12 months?
I've seen a lot of board rooms over the last 18 years and have met with boards of directors for companies with as few as 100 employees and companies with as many as 50,000 employees. In every one of these meetings, I've been asked the inevitable, arguably rhetorical question, "Are we secure yet?"