RGA's Mark Showers Brings a Large-Company Perspective to Rapidly Growing RGA Reinsurance.
At Monsanto, Showers presided over a much larger technology organization -- with approximately 1,500 full-time equivalents and a budget of more than $100 million, as opposed to the approximately 200 FTEs and a budget not exceeding 1 percent of the company's annual revenue that he currently oversees at RGA (approximately $7.1 billion in 2009 revenue). But even in this regard, Showers notes, his experience is a plus.
RGA's roots go back to 1973, with the founding of General American's life reinsurance division. In 2000 MetLife acquired General American Life Insurance Co., along with its majority ownership position in RGA. In the decade since then, RGA has evolved from a single-line, exclusively North American company with $55 million in life reinsurance in force to a Fortune 500, multiline company with operations in 23 countries and $2.3 trillion in life reinsurance in force. The company split off from MetLife in September 2008.
In several respects, RGA's growth has outpaced its technology capabilities, Showers notes, and his agenda reflects the company's need to transition from small-company to large-company capabilities. The challenge is to reduce complexity globally while retaining the freedom enjoyed by RGA's far-flung operational centers, according to Showers. "The decentralized model is what facilitates the entrepreneurial spirit," he says. "The excitement, to me, is bringing IT together and creating more of a global, cohesive unit."
Though RGA has a relatively small employee footprint, its proliferation of branch offices introduces a great deal of complexity, Showers explains. "Things that worked when this was a $500 million, $1 billion or $3 billion company don't necessarily work for $7 billion company," he admits. "Certain processes tend to kink, and technology is one of the keys to unkink those processes and make them sustainable."
New infrastructure was fundamental to keeping data and information flowing through the enterprise, Showers says. Accordingly, he has undertaken major infrastructure improvements, including implementing a third-party data center model that obviates the need for hardware in branch offices through reliance on colocation facilities in London, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto and St. Louis. RGA also is in the throes of replacing its semi-private wide-area network (WAN), which was deployed early in the company's global expansion, with a multiprotocol label-switching (MPLS) approach. "We signed a major deal in May with AT&T," Showers relates. "In terms of simplifying our environment, each branch office will go from seven devices to three." The MPLS network also will deliver a quality-of-service dimension unavailable in the current WAN, as well as the ability to prioritize traffic, according to Showers.
Showers' team also is introducing a WAN optimization solution from Riverbed Technology (San Francisco) to make it easy for personnel to access large amounts of data quickly, now that their data stores may not be in the same facility. The devices speed delivery of data and also incorporate artificial intelligence to learn to anticipate what files will be needed, Showers reports. "Actuaries use very big spreadsheets, and it makes it far less onerous to have those readily available in a secured environment such as a data center," he explains.
Managing on a Global Scale
To foster the success of major initiatives such as these, Showers has renovated RGA's technology leadership team, with an emphasis on prior global experience, he says. He also has introduced a new project management office (PMO). "The PMO is made of hands-on project managers and a portfolio project management office with an emphasis on artifacts, frameworks, training the organization to be part of well-structured projects, and also a risk assessment piece," Showers relates.
The new team demonstrated its acumen in its handling of the technology integration of ING's former group reinsurance business, which RGA acquired in January 2010; the integration concluded according to plan in mid-August. "They were outsourced to IBM Global Services, so we had to do a full infrastructure build-out," Showers recounts. "The initiative had an amazing number of parts, so it showed just how much value the PMO could add." RGA enjoys a healthy reduction in ongoing costs associated with the group compared to when it was still a part of ING, according to Showers.
The benefits of other initiatives -- such as a financial reporting initiative based on Oracle technology, undertaken in partnership with PwC (New York) -- are harder to quantify. "We're embarking on a major initiative to redesign and re-implement our general ledger, accounts payable and associated capabilities, such as master data management, in response to both our global success and the need to prepare for reporting requirements of IFRS, Solvency II and other changes," Showers elaborates.
Earlier this year Showers' organization completed an implementation of Microsoft CRM for its international and Canada divisions on time and on budget. "It was a move to a single global customer database -- a combination of software, infrastructure and great engagement between the business and IT," says Showers. "It's hard to quantify its impact, but it is certainly a heavily used tool."
Showers emphasizes the importance of a "large-company model" of project management to the success of IT initiatives at today's RGA. "In a smaller-company model, you tend to be unstructured in many things," he comments. "But when you get the complexity of a global company, all of a sudden you start leaking oil fast on that unstructured stuff."
Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio
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