I am more focused on spending on development than maintenance: Piyush Singh

Q&A with CIO, Great American Insurance Company

Property and casualty insurer, Great American Insurance Company, has been doing business with some leading Indian IT services companies, such as HCL Technologies, for years. The company's Chief Information Officer (CIO) Piyush Singh spoke to Itika Sharma Punit during his visit to India to attend InTech50, an event organised by IT product industry think-tank iSpirt. He talks about why the insurance segment has been one of the laggards in terms of IT spending and the demand environment in the US. Edited excerpts ...

Insurance sector has always been a laggard in adoption of technology. What do you think is the reason for the same?

I think a big reason why insurance lags in adopting technology vis-a-vis some other sectors is because insurance is still sold and not bought. So when I sell it to you, I have not taken the effort to put the end customers in view and simplify the product for the longer term. The day consumers start buying it, it's going to change the complexity of the insurance, and then it will become more consumer-friendly.

When do you see this trend of low technology usage by insurance companies reversing?

I think it will have to reverse soon. What happens is that because we are an infrequent user industry, we have not gravitated towards technology as much as banking, which has a very high frequency of transactions. But in the new world, as we have more and more data, we will have to become more intuitive to understand the consumers. There is no indication that should not tell me that it will not change in the long-term.

We have heard diverse opinions from Indian companies about the demand environment in the US this year; what are your views about the same?

I would say that demand never went down; there might have be some constraint in financial availability, but demand has always been there. Talking about this year, the corporate earnings have improved over the previous year and stock prices are better. So things have improved in that sense, and most companies realise that they will have to invest which leads the entire ecosystem to improve, and IT is a very integral part of business.

Could you talk about your IT budgets for this year?

I cannot comments on that. But I can tell you that my challenge always is to make sure that I do more development in my company, and keep expenses on maintenance under check.

Are you looking at partnering with any Indian product start-ups?

This is our first venture to looking at this space. I have my team here and we have no reason not to look at opportunities here. We are not limited by geographies. If we can do services here, we can do products also here.

What are your views about the software products coming out of India?

Majority of the large companies have large product setups in India. Whether it is an IBM, Microsoft, SAP, etc, all of them have some kind of labs here. So the concept of product is good in India. Secondly, many of the people who are getting into products here are those who understand the business and their experience is very relevant. They have come to realise that products are the way to go forward.