Verisk, a Jersey City-based data analytics provider, has agreed to buy FAST, a software company serving the life insurance and annuity industry, it announced Wednesday.
The price for the Iselin company is $193.5 million, Verisk said in a news release.
Verisk said the definitive agreement will give it FAST’s flexible policy administration system that helps insurers accelerate underwriting and claims.
“As customer expectations for a fast and easy insurance experience rapidly increase, life insurers are being pressured to modernize operations across the policy life cycle,” Neil Spector, president of Verisk business ISO, said in a prepared statement. “But transitioning from legacy solutions is a major investment in time and money. The plug-and-play software that FAST has developed lets life insurers make this transition in stages and without a large upfront capital commitment.”
FAST, which stands for “Flexible Architecture, Simplified Technology,” provides a Software-as-a-Service suite of components that life insurers can use to upgrade legacy policy administration systems, Verisk said.
“Verisk has become a leader in developing solutions that help insurers make critical decisions with increased speed and precision,” Tom Famularo, FAST’s CEO, said in a statement. “As part of Verisk, we’ll be able to enhance our software, expand our reach and provide robust analytics to meet the rapidly changing needs of life insurers and their customers.”
Verisk offers a suite of solutions for life insurers that includes advanced analytics, automation and more.
“The acquisition of FAST will extend our offerings to the life insurance market as we build a comprehensive suite of innovative solutions to support insurer modernization,” Mark Anguillare, Verisk’s chief operating officer, said in a statement. “By working with FAST technology and its customers, we’ll be able to improve our predictive models and offer integrated data analytics to life insurers through an end-to-end workflow solution.”
