Special Advertising Section
Market Force
Quadrant’s
Review: First of all, please give us a brief out-
line of Quadrant and some of the company’s products.
powerful
MiCHaeL MaCauLeY, CeO: Quadrant started in
MapPro analysis
B
est’s
1991 and has maintained itself as a closely held, private
tool delivers an
company, having never sought private equity or venture capital
funds. We’ve earned our place in this business through hard
unsurpassed
work and much toil. We stand alone, I think, as one of the lead-
suite of both
ers if not the leader in this market space. We have 150 employ-
historic and
ees and a multinational environment and offer everything from
pricing analysis, which is our foremost product, to retail prod-
predictive
ucts, data analysis packages, research and FYIOnly.net, where
metrics for
you can get manuals from all 50 states—auto and home—and
auto and home
access more than 20,000 rate files.
BR: Your latest product is MapPro 7, a property-casualty tool
insurers.
that debuted in June… Michael Macauley,
MaCauLeY: We started off in 1995 with our first version of
Chief Executive Officer
MapPro. There was no Internet or anything but DOS, so we filled
it with some Excel products and eventually grew various gen-
erations of our Map Products series. MapPro 7 has a completely
new environment in a .NET setting, which is the current best-
“
MapPro 7
has a completely
use-of-operations environment. A whole new look and feel, a lot new environ-
more resources, access to not just the 20,000 rate files and their
ment in a .NET
premiums but also the subset of premiums, coverages and rate
setting, which is
files associated with them, source rate files and a variety of dif-
the current best-
ferent aspects to those rate files. It’s quite a robust platform.
BR: How does Quadrant define “market intelligence” these
use-of-operations
days in the insurance sector and what makes it so valuable?
environment. It’s
MaCauLeY: Market intelligence in the past was pretty quite a robust
simple. These days you have multi-variance factors, a lot of
platform.
variables to match up. So our quest is not just to develop the
”
systems to find the answers, but also to obtain the source infor-
mation and run it through our analysis tools internally before
we present it to our client. We have the historical ratings to see
what happened back in 2003 but I need to be able to predict
what’s going to happen in 2010, too. So market intelligence
not only covers the past; it covers the present and certainly
the future. We’re trying to blaze a trail, to give companies, even
those on the smaller side, a break and help them to compete
with the big boys.
BR: From your California viewpoint, what’s next for Quadrant
and for the data-solutions side of the insurance business?
Listen to the
MaCauLeY: We’re from the West, but most of our clients
full interview
are east of the Mississippi so we spend a lot of our time back
there. That’s the reason for having our Tennessee office—we’re
pretty much an hour or an hour-and-a-half away from any of
our affiliates. As far as how California looks at things, being that
it’s highly regulated, it’s so different from the rest of the states
that it’s hard to associate it with anybody else. As for how we
view things, our customer service hours extend back to the East
Coast, so much of the time I’m thinking “New Jersey” and not
California. It’s a different world.
BR
n For the complete audio interview, visit www.bestreview.com/tech09.html.
Best’s Review Special Section 95