Bill Diaz became CEO of Atlanta-based risk management information systems provider Ventiv Technology Inc. in January 2017 and has been in the risk and insurance technology business for more than 25 years. Before joining Ventiv, he was general manager, insurance, with Oracle Corp. Mr. Diaz was also with Marsh ClearSight LLC for 17 years, rising to CEO. Mr. Diaz recently spoke with Business Insurance Deputy Editor Claire Wilkinson about developments in the RMIS market and plans for growth. Edited excerpts follow.
Q: Ventiv was recently acquired by private equity firm Tailwind Capital Group LLC. What does the change in ownership mean for the company?
A: The integrated risk management space for technology is growing significantly. Ventiv is clearly one of the leaders in that space, so we had tremendous interest in our business. Tailwind was excited to partner with Ventiv to continue our growth trajectory. Tailwind is also about three times larger than our former private equity owner and is very interested in accelerating our growth plans beyond organic growth efforts such as significantly expanding our client facing operations, but then coupled with capital so that we can make further acquisitions in this space to broaden our range of capabilities across integrated risk management.
Q: What is Ventiv’s appetite for mergers and acquisitions?
A: We made two acquisitions in the last 18 months. In December 2018, Ventiv acquired claims software firm David Corp., and we acquired RMIS provider WebRisk from Effisoft SAS in October 2017. Our primary focus moving forward is to continue to expand out across the integrated risk management landscape. For example, historically there are multiple stakeholders within an organization responsible for managing, administering or mitigating risk on behalf of an organization. Ventiv grew out of an insurance broker, so historically we’ve been focused on the director or vice president of risk management and out of that department. Over time, we have worked with other functional teams such as environmental health and safety teams. But there are many other stakeholders responsible for risk management such as legal teams, IT teams, business continuity teams, so we have organically built a capability for ELM, which is Enterprise Legal Management, through a partnership with the County of Los Angeles. I think we can both broaden our capability in ELM as well as other areas across the integrated risk management spectrum like business continuity management, vendor risk management, IT risk management.
Q: There’s been substantial M&A activity in the RMIS and broader industry in recent years. How does that affect Ventiv’s business?
A: Every acquisition creates some level of opportunity. It all depends on how it is managed. This isn’t isolated to the integrated risk management marketplace, but obviously there are examples of combinations that go awry where customers are unclear about the management team, the strategy and the commitment to their buyins. In those cases, it creates great opportunities for competitors. The inverse is that through acquisition, companies can add tremendous capability and intellectual property and broaden their customer base and reach, creating opportunities for cross-selling and expansion. That’s certainly what we intend to do as we continue to pursue our acquisition strategy.
Q: How will technology transform the insurance and risk management industry in the future?
A: Much of this is driven by the increased visibility, importance and interest that risk management is gaining at corporations or client public entities in the first place. As the need for that information has grown, so has the demand for solutions that we provide because today risk management is getting board level visibility and you need a tool or toolset to be able to track and manage that effectively. In that sense, the wind is at our back. The market trends are helping us and the challenge for our customers is to manage this across the enterprise. Also, mobile adoption and digital is pervasive, and our society is changing with millennials. It is how people expect to interact with companies either to provide information or get information. So we’ve invested a lot of our resources around improving our digital capabilities for our customers, because getting risk information early in the process is critically important to determine the severity of the outcome or potential outcome. Finally, tools like robotic process automation are going to be increasingly important. Every company is being driven to be more efficient with its time so it can operate around the clock. Utilities like RPA really enable that.
Q: What are some of the key technology tools most used by risk managers?
A: Beyond digital and mobile, and RPA, the other tool is analytics. For example, if you’re the risk manager of a hospitality business with multiple locations, by combining social data with traditional risk data we’ve begun to see correlations. If people are complaining, let’s say on Facebook, around the cleanliness of a location that a hospitality group might be managing, you can expect that there will be greater frequency and severity of losses that would be directly correlated to the number of customer complaints. If you go into a facility that’s dirty or poorly managed, or understaffed, there could be many root causes to risk-related events. By the time you have a claim, it’s just a claim, but what were the root causes of that claim that drove a certain type of behavior? I could use similar examples with weather and socioeconomic data. We’re seeing more and more risk managers becoming increasingly savvy around trying to understand the root cause of their risk so that they can employ better practices and loss control measures.
