Risk Management
PR Newswire | January 10, 2024
Specialty Program Group LLC (SPG), a leading operator of specialty insurance brokerage, underwriting and consulting facilities, announced today the acquisition of the assets of Disaster Recovery Services, LLC and its affiliate, Disaster Recovery & Risk Solutions, LLC (collectively, DRS), a premier provider of disaster preparation, response, and recovery consulting for commercial and public entities. Established with a commitment to aid organizations in their times of need, DRS brings to the table extensive experience in disaster preparedness planning and mitigation, real-time response coordination, forensic accounting and financial recovery services, particularly in responding to adverse events such as fires, floods, and hurricanes. DRS rounds out this comprehensive support with construction project management, grant administration, and procurement consulting.
"Partnering with DRS aligns perfectly with our mission to offer innovative and comprehensive solutions to our clients," said SPG President & CEO, Christopher Treanor. "DRS's expertise in disaster recovery not only complements our existing services but also strengthens our commitment to providing unparalleled support in times of crisis."
With its expertise in handling complex scenarios, DRS has established itself as a trusted partner in providing turnkey solutions throughout the recovery process, whether it involves commercial insurance recovery, FEMA reimbursement, construction project management, grant administration, procurement support, or mitigation and resiliency.
"Joining forces with SPG opens new avenues for growth and allows us to leverage their extensive network and resources," said DRS CEO, John Albrecht.
This acquisition aligns with SPG's strategic goal to diversify and strengthen its portfolio, extending its reach into the critical areas of disaster preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery. The enhanced capabilities brought by DRS will help ensure SPG continues to meet the evolving needs of its clients and partners in an increasingly complex risk environment.
About Specialty Program Group
Specialty Program Group LLC (SPG) is a leading specialty platform headquartered in Chicago, IL, with a diverse portfolio of specialty insurance operations spanning underwriting management, digital solutions, wholesale and specialty retail brokerage, and insurance services. SPG has a track record of scaling industry leading businesses by providing access to business resources, technology and process efficiency, capital and investment, deep carrier relationships, and a broad distribution network.
About Disaster Recovery Services
Disaster Recovery Services, together with its affiliate, Disaster Recovery & Risk Solutions, LLC, collectively (DRS), is a leading provider of disaster response and recovery solutions, specializing in helping organizations prepare for and navigate the aftermath of disasters like fires, floods, and hurricanes. They offer a range of services including customized disaster preparedness planning and mitigation, real-time coordination during crises, and post-loss insurance and FEMA recovery guidance. DRS is committed to partnering with clients for effective recovery, helping to ensure organizations are well-prepared and resilient in the face of unforeseen disasters.
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Insurance Technology
PR Newswire | January 29, 2024
Today at the T3 Technology Conference, Ladder, the insurtech offering digital, flexible life insurance in minutes announced an integration with Envestnet | MoneyGuide, a leading financial planning software company serving over 107,000 financial advisors. This will empower more financial advisors with the capabilities to provide clients with term life insurance issued by reputable insurers.
With this partnership, financial advisors utilizing Envestnet I MoneyGuide Elite's Advanced Lifetime Protection tool will be able to offer their clients digital, convenient, and affordable term life insurance. Financial advisors will be able to estimate clients' coverage needs, generate a quote, and send clients a link to apply—all from within the Envestnet | MoneyGuide platform.
MoneyGuide's Advanced Lifetime Protection tool is designed to illustrate how a clients' protection needs can change over time. This tool may help advisors identify an opportunity to improve a client's probability of successfully achieving the goals in their client's financial plan.
"Life insurance is a critical piece of a comprehensive financial plan," says Mike Izakov, Head of Financial Institution Partnerships at Ladder. "We believe MoneyGuide has the most robust planning tool in the industry, and we're excited to make it even easier for advisors to get clients the coverage their plans call for."
With Ladder's industry-leading digital capabilities and proprietary flexible coverage (i.e. "laddering"), advisors using Envestnet | MoneyGuide will be able to utilize a visualization showcasing how a strategically laddered Ladder policy may save clients up to 40%* over a 30-year term compared to traditional term coverage.
"Envestnet's generational research shows that a surprising 50% of Baby Boomers are not formally organizing their long-term finances," said Rose Palazzo, Group President of Envestnet Financial Planning. "Through our partnership with Ladder, our advisors are better equipped to help their clients take action on organizing their financial plans, including the important step of seeking to secure their financial futures through life insurance coverage. Ladder provides our advisors with digital access to term life insurance products, with an integration built right into our protection planning solution."
Ladder offers term life insurance for coverage between $100,000 and $8 million, for terms ranging from 10 to 30 years. There are no medical exams required for coverage up to $3 million, just questions about an applicant's health are asked. The pricing is fully underwritten and backed by reputable carriers. Ladder offers a variety of partnership and compensation models to meet the needs of fee-based and insurance-licensed financial advisors.
About Ladder
Ladder is the first full-stack, digital life insurance company offering flexible online term coverage in minutes that can save policyholders up to 40%* by adjusting their coverage as their life changes. Ladder uses real-time underwriting to make life insurance as accessible, affordable, and beloved as it should be. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, and offers coverage up to $8M with no hidden fees.
ABOUT ENVESTNET
Envestnet is transforming the way financial advice is delivered through an ecosystem of technology, solutions, and intelligence. By establishing the connections between people's daily financial decisions and long-term financial goals, Envestnet empowers them to make better sense of their finances and live an Intelligent Financial Life. With more than $5.4 trillion in platform assets—more than 107,000 advisors, 16 of the 20 largest U.S. banks, 48 of the 50 largest wealth management and brokerage firms, more than 500 of the largest RIAs, and thousands of companies, depend on Envestnet technology and services to help drive better outcomes for their businesses and for their clients.
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Life Insurance
PR Newswire | January 10, 2024
Sapiens International Corporation, a leading global provider of software solutions for the insurance industry, and the leading Norwegian insurance company Gjensidige Pensjonsforsikring (GPF) today announced that GPF has gone live with Sapiens CoreSuite for Life & Pensions and Sapiens Cloud Services for their individual savings. GPF is the first Nordic customer to go-live with CoreSuite, which will expand the insurer's digital capabilities and boost its leading market position.
Designed to enable greater automation and operational efficiency, Sapiens CoreSuite for Life & Pensions provides GPF with an optimised, Norwegian-tailored platform with real-time access to centrally managed data. As a single, unified system on the cloud, CoreSuite provides a cost-efficient, cloud-based IT infrastructure to streamline workflows, accelerate digital transformation and improve customer engagement.
The CoreSuite solution is maintained and updated continuously by Sapiens in accordance with the latest technological and regulatory requirements.
"Sapiens has now completed the initial phase of our core transformation project to CoreSuite and provided valuable support throughout the journey," said Torstein Ingebretsen, CEO of GPF. A strong core and strategy are essential to GPF's growth in Norway's rapidly changing pensions market."
"We are proud to have achieved this important milestone in the Nordics with a regional leader like GPF," added Roni Al-Dor, Sapiens President and CEO. "We will continue to support GPF's journey to drive innovation and set the standard for best-in-class customer service with our transformative, future-oriented, cloud-based IT infrastructure."
Sapiens CoreSuite for Life & Pensions is a software solution for end-to-end core operations and processes. An award-winning policy administration system, it supports individual and group products across life, health, wealth & retirement. Sapiens Cloud Services supports business growth with a holistic offering of value-added cloud services that provides all operations and application management services under one roof.
About Gjensidige Pensjonsforsikring (GPF)
Gjensidige Pensjonsforsikring (GPF) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Gjensidige Forsikring. GPF mainly offers defined contribution, investment products, pension plans and risk products for groups and individuals in the Norwegian market.
About Sapiens
Sapiens International Corporation empowers the financial sector, with a focus on insurance, to transform and become digital, innovative and agile. With more than 40 years of industry expertise, Sapiens' cloud-based SaaS insurance platform offers pre-integrated, low-code capabilities across core, data, and digital domains to accelerate our customers' digital transformation. Serving over 600 customers in more than 30 countries, Sapiens offers insurers across property and casualty, workers' compensation, and life insurance markets the most comprehensive set of solutions, from core to complementary, including Reinsurance, Financial & Compliance, Data & Analytics, Digital, and Decision Management.
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Insurance Technology
PR Newswire | January 10, 2024
Keeper Security, the leading provider of zero-trust and zero-knowledge cybersecurity software protecting passwords, passkeys, privileged access, secrets and remote connections, announces Granular Sharing Enforcements will soon be available for all products in the Keeper® platform. Granular Sharing enables administrators to enforce detailed creating and sharing permissions at the user level. By implementing these permissions, organizations can ensure employees only have access to the resources necessary for their roles, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access, data breaches and lateral movement within a network.
"It's critical for organizations to have security solutions that help them adhere to increasing regulations and compliance requirements," said Craig Lurey, CTO and Co-founder of Keeper Security. "Granular permission control helps organizations enhance their security posture by restricting access to sensitive information and systems. With Granular Sharing Enforcements, it's easier than ever for IT administrators to better control the principle of least privilege and streamline operations within their organizations."
Keeper's added Granular Sharing Enforcement policies provide more detailed restrictions that administrators can apply to users for both creating and sharing records. Most employees do not need access to all of the data or functionalities within an organization, and many industries and geographical regions have specific regulations and compliance requirements regarding data protection and privacy, including HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS and SOX. Granular permission controls enable organizations to align with local and industry regulations by allowing them to define and enforce access policies. This helps in ensuring the organization is compliant with industry standards and legal requirements.
Key features of Keeper's Granular Sharing Enforcements include:
Auditing: Keeper provides clear alerting and reporting on over 100 different event types.
Version control: Only a small subset of users have permissions to update or share records, helping teams ensure information is consistent and accurate.
Seamless access on any device: Keeper provides the same user experience across platforms, ensuring cross functionality and ease of use, whether on web, desktop or mobile.
Encryption: Keeper provides secure sharing with elliptic curve encryption, ensuring cybercriminals cannot intercept passwords or other shared records in transit.
Keeper Administrators can easily customize permissions to best suit the compliance needs of their organization. Administrators modify permissions in the Enforcement Policies section of the Admin Console for the chosen role by selecting Creating and Sharing. Most permissions are activated by default for maximum security. Enforcements have been designed to be simple and powerful, allowing admins to choose the appropriate settings for their unique needs.
Granular Sharing Enforcements will be available for all sharing needs within Keeper's Enterprise Password Manager, Keeper Secrets Manager and KeeperPAM. With Keeper's zero-knowledge password management and security platform, IT administrators have complete visibility into employee password practices, enabling them to monitor password use and enforce password security policies, including strong, unique passwords, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and other security policies. Keeper Secrets Manager is a fully managed cloud-based, zero-knowledge platform for securing infrastructure secrets such as API keys, database passwords, access keys, certificates and any type of confidential data.
Its latest offering, KeeperPAM, provides next-generation Privileged Access Management (PAM) that is disrupting the traditional PAM market. KeeperPAM delivers enterprise-grade password, secrets and privileged connection management within a unified SaaS platform that is cost-effective, easy to use and simple to deploy. KeeperPAM enables least-privilege access with zero-trust and zero-knowledge security. Enterprises select Keeper because of its strong security architecture, ability to support federated and passwordless authentication with any identity provider, seamless integration into on-premises, cloud or hybrid environments and ease of use across desktop and mobile devices.
About Keeper Security
Keeper Security is transforming cybersecurity for people and organizations around the world. Keeper's affordable and easy-to-use solutions are built on a foundation of zero-trust and zero-knowledge security to protect every user on every device. Our next-generation privileged access management solution deploys in minutes and seamlessly integrates with any tech stack to prevent breaches, reduce help desk costs and ensure compliance. Trusted by millions of individuals and thousands of organizations, Keeper is the leader for best-in-class password and passkey management, secrets management, privileged access, secure remote access and encrypted messaging.
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