Tech Mahindra’s inorganic growth is expanding its insurance portfolio

Insurance carriers must stay agile and adaptable to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing business environment in 2023. Carriers’ ability to respond to uncertainty will be key as they face heightened inflation, rising interest rates, climate change and associated natural disasters, a talent crisis with an aging workforce, and continued competitive forces in the form of insurtechs and non-industry players.

Our latest HFS Pulse survey in Exhibit 1 shows that insurance companies are most concerned about cybersecurity, as they hold sensitive customer data and are at risk of cyberattacks.

Exhibit 1: Insurance carriers are most concerned about cybersecurity and inflation-related challenges

Sample: HFS Pulse Dashboard, 2022; 38 executives across Global 2000 enterprises; filters = insurance (life and annuity, property and casualty, reinsurance)
Source: HFS Research, 2023

One global technology service provider, Tech Mahindra, believes that at the core of these macroeconomic headwinds lie traditional challenges like legacy systems, constantly changing and increasing regulations, and low productivity and growth.

Acquisitions bring platform capabilities as well as two new insurtechs to Tech Mahindra’s insurance practice

Since 2022, Tech Mahindra has invested more than half a billion dollars and made several acquisitions in the insurance space, including Tenzing and CTCO, helping the company expand its capabilities and offerings in the sector. Tenzing, acquired in 2020, has helped the service provider scale up its P&C insurance offerings, particularly bolstering Guidewire platform expertise and partner status.

CTCO, acquired in 2022, brought Tech Mahindra an expanded life and reinsurance capability in Eastern Europe. This deal included minority investments by the service provider in two insurtech ventures, Swifter and Surance. Swifter is a white-labeled digital distribution platform that enables brokers, insurers, and price comparison websites to reach customers directly through digital channels. Surance is a personal cyber insurance solution focusing on vulnerability assessment, cyber protection, and cyber insurance coverage via a B2B2C business model, where it provides a white-labeled platform to the insurer.

The addition of CTCO brings a greater nearshore delivery footprint for the service provider, which many insurance clients are seeking today. The combined entity brings digital engineering talent with domain experience in core platform development for insurance and reinsurance clients.

Tech Mahindra’s diverse portfolio addresses evolving insurance challenges with digital product engineering and cloud transformation solutions

Sensing the market needs, global IT services provider Tech Mahindra has steadily expanded its insurance-specific capabilities in the last few years, following a long history of working with insurance clients. Tech Mahindra focuses on infrastructure and cloud modernization; it has helped insurance companies migrate to the cloud and achieve cost savings and business agility through its various cloud migration factories and other accelerators. The service provider also focuses on customer experience (CX), exploring how to best offer relevant capabilities to its insurance clients, including CX design, behavior research, and platform and system integration.

Tech Mahindra has a track record of delivering cost savings and productivity improvements to its insurance clients through its various accelerators and managed services offerings. In the spirit of delivering tangible business outcomes, Tech Mahindra is showing it has skin in the game. In many of its insurance engagements, the service provider commits to passing savings back into its clients’ transformation efforts from day one.

For example, Tech Mahindra worked with one of the largest composite carriers in APAC to move completely to the cloud in the APAC region, resulting in $120 million in savings and increased productivity. Tech Mahindra also worked with a top-three global reinsurer for more than 20 years, building an automated underwriting platform that nearly 70 primary life carriers use to process 15 million applications annually with a 90% straight-through processing rate.

The Bottom Line: If you’re a technology or operations leader in a global insurance or reinsurance organization, consider whether your third-party service partners are truly helping you tackle multiple priorities for your business.

Tech Mahindra’s combination of core insurance digital product engineering, CX expertise, commitment to cost savings from day one, and cloud modernization capabilities makes them a worthy challenger to much larger incumbents. As insurance technology and operations engagements mature, consider how service providers can deliver not just cost savings but also work toward improving CX, managing risks, increasing flexibility, and ideally driving innovation to enable you to better meet the needs of customers and stakeholders.