More than 180 international insurers and reinsurance companies provide services from Ireland, including eight of the top ten global brands. Today, 35,000 professionals work in Ireland’s insurance industry. It’s also home to a growing ecosystem of innovative insurtech companies that has doubled in two years, from 60 companies to 114 by 2024.
Continuing progress calls for continuing upskilling, and that’s where Ireland offers insurers the opportunity to put in place organisation-wide training and transformation to adapt and be ready for the future. Through IDA Ireland’s training grant, client companies can avail of financial support in upskilling and developing their workforce to respond to strategic challenges within their business.
Identifying skills gaps
As part of the engagement with client companies, IDA Ireland carries out “diagnostics” to identify skills gaps in a business and match them with supports.“Like all business sectors, technology is creating new opportunities for transformation and change within businesses. Insurers globally have an imperative to catch up on digitalisation: that involves redeveloping their own platforms, and also upskilling employees so that they have the skills of the future,” says Andrew Noonan, Vice President at IDA Ireland’s international financial services division.
“A lot of large international insurers are now leading on R&D type activities from here. We’re also seeing companies cross-skilling and upskilling their employees in Ireland through the support of IDA,” Noonan adds.Growing the remit in Ireland
Optum is one example from the healthcare industry of how this support works in practice. It first set up in Letterkenny in 1999 with a small claims processing operation for its US parent company UnitedHealth Group, one of the world’s largest insurers. Since that time, Optum has grown in scale and capability in Ireland.In practice, “doing more from Ireland” has involved nurturing not just the skills needed in the business today but identifying new areas over a three-to-five year timeframe. The Irish operation has successfully diversified over time, by consistently adding new capabilities and providing global leadership for parts of the business from Ireland. It also built a large data science and analytics team that has a broad remit, from looking at ways to reduce the cost of care to detecting early onset diseases among members to ensure early treatment and improved outcomes.“Optum in Ireland stands out for its talented workforce, its capability and collaboration across many different business functions, striving to make the healthcare system work better for everyone. We embraced the opportunity to do more from Ireland, and training and upskilling our employees was key to enabling this,” says Paul Phelan, Optum’s vice president of external affairs.
Training essential to expansion
Training has been critical to this expansion, Phelan says. “Ten years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to lead a global business from Ireland. Now we can because we have the capability and the talent. And the Dublin office which we opened in 2016 has become a healthcare innovation hub, promoted and helped via the IDA training grant aid.”This has also given Optum’s staff more options for career progression and variety of work while remaining with the business. The company calls this approach “hire to retire”, as it can recruit and retain people by giving them the chance to work in different parts of the business.
Ongoing learning and development has also contributed to high staff retention rates. “That’s a good indicator of the success of the training. Ireland is seen as a place for innovation, sustained by great talent which enables us to attract future investment. Having said that, we don’t have any divine right to have this business here – what’s why training and development is so important,” Phelan adds.“We have plenty of examples where people have come up through the grades and now hold senior positions as a result of good career development with lots of training and upskilling,” Phelan adds.
The skills aren’t just specific to the insurance sector; they also allow employees to learn about the US healthcare industry more generally, and about all-round business knowledge in areas like operational excellence.
Opportunities for training support
IDA Ireland’s training support is open to all client companies; while Optum is one of the largest financial services employers in the country, FFH Management Services has a relatively small base in Dublin. It’s part of the Canadian Fairfax Financial Holdings company, with global property and casualty insurance/reinsurance subsidiaries and an associated investment management company. Its Dublin global services operation supports other Fairfax companies across North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa with group reporting oversight, reinsurance, technology, strategic partnering and M&A services.After engaging with its IDA Ireland Relationship Manager in 2022 and IDA’s Talent Development & Digitalisation Team, FFH decided to undertake the Strategic Talent Development Programme – a programme co-designed by Skillnet and IDA Ireland.
Even as the company put in place its talent strategy, its ambition quickly expanded from building a digital team to a much broader plan to develop leadership capability within the business. After this consultation process, FFH developed a wide-ranging training plan to present to its management team and to IDA Ireland.
“That whole process gave us the confidence to know we could grow a digital team within the company, hire in and develop competencies to build applications and technology services, gather the data, add the intelligence and analytics around that,” explains Clayton Plunkett, director with FFH.
Boosting talent search
With a goal of starting small and developing quickly, FFH expanded its team with a digital services manager, two data analysts, a development lead and two junior developers. It engaged with an English social enterprise and education provider, Code First Girls, that gives women from different walks of life free coding courses that allows them to change careers and move into technical roles. Plunkett points out that this approach has encouraged diversity within the team and also allowed FFH to attract talent without having to compete with large tech companies’ extensive operations in Dublin.Plunkett draws a direct connection between the digital skills that emerged from the training strategy, with the Dublin office’s increased responsibilities. “It’s been massively important. ESG, GHG and several new services couldn’t be performed in the way they are without the digital services offering we provide. It’s opened up a capability that we haven’t had before in the Dublin office. We are now offering a full capability and we have a more than healthy pipeline of work for initiatives from small- to medium- to large-scale group-wide data collection and reporting services. We always had a very good reputation within the group, but this has added a very significant string to our bow in a very short space of time. The training gave us the focus to move forward and confidence we were moving in the right direction.”
Positive support from IDA Ireland
The team is now in a continuous learning environment, Plunkett adds. “Engagement with Team IDA Ireland set us off on the right foot and we haven’t looked back. I can’t stress enough how supportive they were. It’s been a steady and positive relationship and we’ve grasped the opportunity with both hands.”Plunkett encourages other IDA Ireland clients to find out about the support on offer, because it enables them to expand the variety of services that companies can provide from Ireland, creating possibilities for growth. “It’s a no-brainer: you have a proactive consultative partner, so why wouldn’t you avail of that support or explore the opportunities that it provides? I’d also recommend the Strategic Talent Development Programme. That helped us to ask questions of ourselves in terms of the approach we wanted to take,” he adds.
IDA Ireland’s Andrew Noonan says that transformation is the “biggest challenge” facing insurers, which makes it imperative to get support in wide-scale change. “If you want to change your business, you need the business knowledge and you need the technology skills. The unique proposition in Ireland is that there are loads of people who understand insurance alongside a great depth of technology and digital skills, and here you can marry them together to change the insurance business from the inside. And for companies that want to grow and develop those skills internally, IDA’s training supports are ready for just that purpose.”