Insurance giant RSA announces another outsourcing deal

Hot on the heels of its IT infrastructure outsourcing deal with Wipro, insurance company RSA has penned a six-year business process outsourcing (BPO) deal with Accenture.

The insurance BPO will see Accenture provide IT-enabled services in the back office, for customer services and for services that support intermediaries. The supplier will look at the opportunities for automation as well as standardisation.

Darren Mackenzie, UK chief operating officer at RSA, said the contract, which is an extension of an existing deal, comes after Accenture has delivered “significant cost reductions and enhanced our operations as we aspire to achieve best-in-class performance.”

The companies have an existing contract covering application development, implementation and maintenance services for RSA UK’s IT.  This includes customer relationship management, claims processing, commercial lines products, policy management and back-office operations.

Last week RSA outsourced its UK IT infrastructure to Indian IT services supplier Wipro in a seven-year deal. The agreement will also cover Ireland and Scandinavia and sees Wipro deliver infrastructure as a service.

The BPO market in insurance is heavily reliant on IT and the rise of the digital consumer, leading to increases in spending on IT and services in the sector. In 2014, analyst Everest Group said the insurance industry – which spent $2bn on BPO services in 2011 – would spend between $3.4bn and $3.6bn in 2015.

This trend is set to continue as modern consumers become more comfortable with digital marketing channels.

“Insurers need help to understand the requirements and priorities of digital consumers and are looking to BPO service providers to help them navigate through this channel,” said Everest at the time.

Also in 2014 Forrester Research said insurance companies in Europe were under threat from companies outside their sector because they were behind in digital developments.