This week’s
When we first started tracking M&A in this space nearly a decade ago, we focused significant attention on the tech giants like IBM, MSFT, ORCL, and SAP, pictured on the left of our 2015Q2 market view below, as well as the financial investors, pictured on the right.
Source: Novarica; Insurance Software M&A Update 2015 Q2
While financial investors have gotten much more active in this space in the last five years (lured no doubt by the successful Guidewire and Majesco IPOs), the tech giants are no longer much of a factor. They seem to be focusing much more on their horizontal strengths like cloud and data analytics.
Why is this happening? Well, insurance enterprise technology is not like general enterprise technology. It has a distinctive and closely-connected customer community that values vertical expertise and relationships above all, it requires maintaining a network of partnerships or a comprehensive set of vertical services, and has a business rhythm and sales process that rarely aligns with that of horizontal enterprise technology companies.
Insurance technology companies have been most successful on their own, and frequently struggle to maintain relevance when they are swallowed up by larger companies with broader markets. Right now, most of the M&A activity in this space is taking place among the vertical insurance software providers themselves. We expect this to continue for the foreseeable future.
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