Insurance companies are responding swiftly to several major influences:

• Deregulation allows new competitors to expand into wide-ranging business areas
• Demutualization places entire enterprises under the increased scrutiny of public markets
• Mergers and Acquisitions dramatically change the playing field. M&A activity creates the need for enterprise systems to achieve cost savings and easy integration of business sectors
• Bank-assurance, the selling of financial and insurance products under the same roof, translates into new challenges for insurance companies - to move into new financial products, and challenge new competitors from the banking sector
• E-commerce promises new opportunities as well as fierce competition in sales channels and through increasingly efficient markets
• Customer-centricity is the new focal point of major insurance firms (no longer are they Policy or Product-centric)