Corporate Insurance Management Software: A Buyer's Guide

Start with the problem, not the demo

Before you look at any product, write down what you are replacing and who will use the replacement. The usual answer is a mix: a master spreadsheet owned by finance, a broker’s portal that shows only that broker’s placements, an ERP fixed-asset register that does not know about insurance, and HR’s own list of employees on the group health scheme. Each is right about its own corner and wrong about the whole.

The category of software that joins these up is usually called a risk management information system, or RMIS; for most mid-size corporates the practical need is narrower and better described as insurance portfolio management. If the term is new, What is an RMIS? explains what these systems do and do not do.

Be honest about who will log in. A system used only by one insurance manager needs different things from one that plant heads, HR, finance controllers and a broker will all touch. The second kind is harder to buy and far more valuable.

The buyer's checklist

These are the capabilities that separate an insurance system from a document store with a calendar. Score each vendor against them.

• Registers. Assets, people, locations and business units as first-class records, each with its own history, and each linkable to one or more policies. If the product only has a policy list, it cannot tell you what is uninsured.
• Cover rules and gap analysis. The ability to state what should be insured (every owned building needs fire cover; every employee needs GPA) and have the system report where reality falls short. See insurance gap analysis for what this looks like in practice.
• Renewals pipeline. Every policy on a timeline with reminders, a status that moves from data-gathering to quotes to bound, and the previous year’s terms beside the new ones.
• Claims. Intimation, documents, insurer correspondence, surveyor visits, amounts claimed and settled, and the link back to the asset or person concerned.
• Endorsements. Mid-term additions, deletions and changes tracked as their own records with premium impact, not as edits to the policy that lose the history.
• Multi-currency. Policies and sums insured in the currency they are written in, with reporting in the group currency, for any organisation with entities outside one country.
• Import from Excel and ERP. Bulk load of assets, employees and policies with validation and a clear error report. A system that cannot take your existing spreadsheet will never be fully populated.
• Roles and approval matrix. Who can view, who can edit, who must approve a claim above a threshold or an endorsement above a value, by entity and by line.
• Audit trail. Every change, by whom, when, with the old and new values. Non-negotiable for anything an auditor or insurer may later question.
• Security. Encryption in transit and at rest, strict tenant isolation if the product is shared, single sign-on, and a clear answer on where data is stored.
• Deployment. Cloud, on-premise or both. On-premise vs cloud sets out the trade-offs; the point here is that the vendor should offer the one your policy on data residency requires, not argue you out of it.
• Reporting. Premium by entity, location and line; sum insured by asset class; claims ratios; renewal calendar; and export of all of it without asking the vendor.

Questions to ask vendors

Demos are designed to be smooth. These questions are designed not to be.

• Show me an asset that is on two policies, and a policy that covers assets in three locations. How does the system show each?
• Load this spreadsheet of our assets, with our column names, in front of us. What fails and why?
• A plant in one subsidiary is sold mid-term. Walk me through the endorsement, the premium refund and what the register shows afterwards.
• Which fields are searchable, which are reportable, and which can we add ourselves without a change request?
• Who owns the data, how do we export all of it, and what does that export look like?
• Where is the data stored, who at your company can see it, and what is your tenant isolation model?
• What happens to our access and our data if we stop paying?
• How do brokers interact with the system — as users with limited roles, or through exports and emails?
• What is your release cadence, and can we choose when to take an upgrade if we host it ourselves?

Red flags

Some warning signs are reliable enough to end a conversation.

• The product has policies but no asset or people register. It is a filing cabinet.
• “Gap analysis” turns out to be a report the vendor’s consultants prepare for you, not something the system does.
• Endorsements are handled by editing the policy record in place.
• There is no audit trail, or it can be switched off.
• Multi-currency means a single exchange rate typed into a settings page.
• The vendor will not commit to on-premise deployment in writing, even though the sales deck mentions it.
• Pricing is per policy or per claim, which punishes you for using the system properly.
• Exports require a professional services engagement.
• The reference customers are all in a different industry, or all at a scale that bears no resemblance to yours.

How to run a pilot

Do not pilot with sample data or a single tidy policy. Pick one business unit with real complexity — several locations, a mix of property, liability and people covers, at least one recent claim and a renewal falling within the pilot window. Then:

• Import the unit’s assets, employees and policies from whatever they currently live in, and record how long it took and what needed manual fixing.
• Define the cover rules for that unit and see whether the gap report matches what the insurance manager already suspects.
• Run the live renewal through the system, including collecting updated sums insured from the plant.
• Raise at least two real endorsements and log the claim end to end.
• Give a finance controller, a plant head and the broker each their own login and ask them, after two weeks, what they could not do.
• Ask for the full export at the end and check it opens, reads and reconciles.

Six to eight weeks is usually enough to learn what you need. Agree in advance what “good” looks like, in writing, so the decision at the end is not a matter of impression.

Where the options sit

The market splits roughly three ways. Large global RMIS platforms built for multinational risk departments, with deep analytics and implementation projects to match. Broker-provided portals, which are convenient and usually free but show only what that broker placed and go away if the broker does. And independent corporate insurance platforms — SAIBA Corporate is one of these — that centre on the registers, cover rules and renewal workflow and can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud.

Which is right depends on the shape of your programme, not the size of your company. A single-country manufacturer with forty locations has a harder insurance problem than a larger firm with two offices, and needs a system built around locations and assets rather than around analytics. Buy for the problem you wrote down at the start.