The Importance of Managing the Insurance Merger by Jeff Picozzi

Properly managing the insurance merger is about to become more important: The insurance industry is headed for a significant increase in merger and acquisition activity, according to KPMG's 2014 Insurance Industry Outlook Survey.

Recently, New Yorker cartoon showed a receiving line of executives shaking hands, with one of them crying into a handkerchief and explaining, I always cry at mergers. Well, if that executive were responsible for managing the insurance merger of information governance, records management or information technology (IT) functions, he would have a very good reason to cry.

Mergers have widespread implications in these areas and are difficult to execute well. This is particularly true when the merger includes new jurisdictions where the combined company will do business.

Merging Record Systems

When managing an insurance merger, the first obvious challenge might be to figure out how to map record systems together. Records and information can be spread across different systems, with different data, metadata, and taxonomy. If the records weren't managed in an orderly and compliant way on both sides of the merger, the challenge could be complicated and take more time than expected.

Also, due to a cross-jurisdictional merger, extra attention is required to the records retention schedule. Varying laws in different jurisdictions require that the retention schedule be examined and modified to account for the differences, if necessary. If the merger is international, the different languages in which the laws are written can further complicate this issue. Many third-party vendors partner with an international law firm to review the international retention schedule by using local attorneys who understand the different countries' laws and regulations.

Information Governance

Important aspects of information governance also vary by jurisdiction. Some examples are security, privacy, disaster recovery and laws pertaining to cross-border data transfers. As with records management, this effort should start with a review of the applicable laws and a look at required policy and procedure changes.

Information Technology

When organizations merge, many areas of IT are implicated. Merging workflows, especially those that may still be paper-based, should be properly examined, as well as merging corporate archives and backup and recovery technologies and practices.

One often underappreciated factor is when two organizations must merge their applications and data. This often results in one set of applications being unused for daily operations but still required for retention, legal hold or archival purposes. When this happens, the redundant applications too often remain sitting in the data center, where there are ongoing costs associated with hardware and software maintenance as well as the costs for data center floor space.

A better way to address this situation is to examine which applications can be archived using database/application-archiving tools specifically designed for application retirement and then managing the retired application on a hierarchical storage system.

So do not cry at your next merger. Partnering with a third-party vendor can be a great way to seamlessly merge data, records and information from both companies.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2014/industry/insurance/the-importance-o...
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