“It’s really been a series of strategic acquisitions of assets with substantial expertise in a few plan areas, and they’re doing work for large plan sponsors, for payers, and for providers,” mentioned John Greenbaum (pictured), govt vice chairman at Risk Strategies. “Over a five-year interval, we’ve been very rigorously property and have acquired a gaggle of them that match very neatly collectively. It’s a little bit little bit of a puzzle; we’ve acquired totally different items, however we lastly have the proper assortment of property in place to mix them right into a single entity that we will then convey to market.
“I think the first acquisition of those companies was somewhat fortuitous. It was early in our acquisition process, and we really hadn’t envisioned the concept of Risk Strategies Consulting. But as we began to coordinate other asset acquisitions over the years, it became a path that really led us to the point where we could collectivize them and launch them as a single entity.”
Risk Strategies Consulting will present the next companies:
- High-touch consulting and state-of-the-art analytics, technique and consulting (encompassing well being and welfare with deep pharmacy experience in addition to mergers and acquisitions);
- Actuarial companies for plan sponsors, suppliers and insurers (encompassing captive and self-funded applications, long-term care, Medicaid, Medicare complement / Advantage, supplemental well being, life insurance coverage, incapacity earnings, reinsurance and stop-loss, healthcare and community supplier consulting and property and casualty actuarial and consulting companies); and
- Benefit audit companies (encompassing worker profit and declare audits; stop-loss companies; and plan doc, coverage and claims assessment).
Breaking down consulting siloes
By merging the collective specialities of every consulting and actuarial agency, Greenbaum mentioned Risk Strategies Consulting can additional help shoppers with an skilled, holistic consulting expertise to handle advanced challenges, and supply superior, proprietary instruments to forecast and plan for his or her future success.
“A lot of the consulting world operates in siloes,” he informed Insurance Business. “Some simply supply actuarial, whereas others give attention to audit, or consulting. We noticed the opportunity of combining and leveraging an built-in suite of companies and capabilities, and apparently, as we checked out every agency’s respective shopper lists, there was a good quantity of overlap. We had been doing audit for among the identical shoppers we had been doing actuarial work for, and the identical with consulting – however every agency was providing these companies independently.
“Through Risk Strategies Consulting, we now have a high degree of interdependence between the entities, so that any client can come in at one entry point, like audit, and then move seamlessly to actuarial and consulting services.”
To obtain this amalgamation, Risk Strategies has developed a proprietary high-trust licensed knowledge warehouse, the place all entities can have entry to the identical info and can work inside the identical surroundings.
“One of the big focuses of Risk Strategies Consulting is to provide services that are intensely data-driven,” mentioned Greenbaum. “We want to offer proprietary, predictive, and prescriptive models that give clients actionable data that they can use to make better business decisions. We’re talking about very large companies on the plan sponsor, the payer, and the provider side – Fortune 500 companies that make significant economic decisions based on the information we’re providing.”
How will the Risk Strategies Consulting enterprise match with the brokerage?
Risk Strategies Consulting will function independently from the corporate’s brokerage enterprise, guaranteeing full enterprise separation of shoppers and autonomy of consulting work.
“Both companies have a completely separate corporate structure,” Greenbaum defined. “The consulting business needs independence from the brokerage business, and we’ve put structural elements in place to ensure that. We’re highly cognizant of the potential for conflict between consulting and brokerage. Our consultants may recommend the use of various risk management tools that may involve insurance, but ultimately, we need to maintain independence between the two operations.”
The main areas of labor that the Risk Strategies Consulting group engages in are: medical, prescription drug, life insurance coverage, incapacity insurance coverage, dental, and staff’ compensation – all of that are additionally important areas of experience on the Risk Strategies brokerage aspect, Greenbaum identified. The consulting and brokerage companies could share knowledge insights and potential referrals, with cautious disclosure of the widespread possession.
“Ultimately, our insurance brokers and brokerage team will be able to and are already beginning to rely on the consulting services to provide them insight into what their clients’ requirements are, and to be able to help guide their clients,” mentioned Greenbaum. “One of the things that we’re learning is that our clients on the brokerage side run a huge gamut from the startup world to very mature large industries, whereas on the consulting side, for the most part, our clients are very large plan sponsors and big insurance companies. We’re really trying to translate some of our learnings from the large market [in the consulting business] down into the middle market and build differentiated tools for our brokerage business.”
What’s subsequent for Risk Strategies Consulting?
After the mixing course of of mixing and rebranding all of the entities, Risk Strategies Consulting is wanting so as to add new employees and can rent its personal unbiased administration group. The enterprise is at present being run by Greenbaum on an interim foundation.
Moving forwards, Greenbaum is eyeing “substantial economic growth” for Risk Strategies Consulting. He believes the normal consulting market is “ripe for disruption” and that the enterprise’s knowledge technique will differentiate it and “allow us to offer clients services that they really haven’t seen before”.
Other brokerage companies to deal with consulting companies embody the worldwide giants like Aon, Marsh, and WTW – and whereas they’re bigger than Risk Strategies, Greenbaum mentioned his group “competes with them every day”.
“Our best teams compete with their brokers regularly, and I think our consulting business will create a distinctive model that will allow us to compete more effectively with them across the board,” mentioned the EVP. “It was an important step for us to take in maturing our business. We’ve been a highly acquisitive company, but we’ve been acquisitive not just for the sake of buying assets, but for building a company that had the right assets to compete in a bigger universe. The conglomeration of assets that we formed into Risk Strategies Consulting has been very intentional, and will support our growth as a company overall.”