Craig Lowenthal is going back to the basics.
As CIO and senior vice president of NYMAGIC Inc., Lowenthal is targeting two key areas in which IT can bring value to a company: growth in scale and efficiency.
“In my past positions, I’ve focused on competitive advantage for technology. Here, I’ve kind of rolled back and I’m looking at efficiency for technology. We need to scale for growth and efficiency to lower our expense ratios,” he says.
Based in New York, NYMAGIC, which stands for New York Marine and General Insurance Company, specializes in marine insurance. The company has 150 employees, 25 of whom are in IT. Net written premiums in 2006 were approximately $155 million.
Lowenthal, who has worked in IT in the insurance industry for more than 19 years, joined NYMAGIC in April after being lured away from Integro Insurance Brokers, where he was CIO. He previously worked as vice president and CIO at Hartford Financial Products, a unit of The Hartford.
“I see this as an opportunity to work on an IT turnaround, and I think I can make a big impact here,” Lowenthal explains. “NYMAGIC has had significant growth during the last few years and plans to continue on a path to double its revenue. However, our expenses are very high. We can bring that down significantly through automation and technology.”
Lowenthal says NYMAGIC’s top executives understand the value IT can offer the business.
“Now that I’m here, I’ve got the right support and the right investment commitment,” he contends. “We’re going to make some key changes to help this company.”
Among those changes are upgrading the company’s policy administration, billing, and reporting systems; investing in portal technology; and revamping agent-facing technologies. Lowenthal also plans to upgrade NYMAGIC’s intranet to promote sharing and content management.
“In order to grow, we need to put out new products quickly,” he asserts. “We need to have good data, good business intelligence, and good collaboration within the company.”
However, Lowenthal intends to spend time investigating the best course of action for NYMAGIC to take before jumping into any major decisions. “I’m trying to formulate what the architecture and direction should be, based on the products that are out there,” he says. “I do know we’re not going to do big-bang projects with long-cycle deliverables. Whatever projects we take on have to be designed so they provide value for the company within two to three months. We can’t wait two to three years to implement something, or we’ll miss the boat.”