Industry News

Key Acquisition Expands Education Opportunities for Industry Professionals

The Institutes CEO Peter Miller sat down with R&I to share how the addition of CLM will help deliver knowledge more efficiently into the hands of risk and insurance professionals.
By: | July 10, 2018

On June 1, The Institutes, a provider of research and educational programming for risk and insurance professionals, closed the books on a deal to acquire CLM, a professional association in the claims resolution and litigation management industries.

Both organizations share a focus on education, and together they’ll serve more than 200,000 claims professionals, risk managers, underwriters, brokers, attorneys and others involved in the industry with broader learning opportunities. Combined, they’ll offer at least 30 designations and countless continuing education credits through online courses, webinars, seminars and other training.

We sat down with President and CEO of The Institutes, Peter Miller, to discuss how the two organizations will work together and what changes members should expect.

R&I: What were some reasons behind The Institutes’ acquisition of CLM?

Peter Miller: This is a transformative time for the industry. Technology is changing how we predict and mitigate risk, how we handle claims, and how we interact with customers. It’s also changing the way that knowledge is delivered, and that matters to The Institutes.

Peter Miller, President & CEO, The Institutes

We’re supported by and work for the benefit of the industry, so we have to make sure we understand the strategic direction of the industry and respond to ensure that professionals have the tools they need to succeed.

CLM adds some content and capabilities that we didn’t have before to help us achieve that mission and serve the industry better.

R&I: What unique content and capabilities does CLM bring to the table, and how does that complement The Institutes?

PM: They have a lot of strengths that complement what we’re trying to do.

For example, we provide online as well as paper-based courses, but we did not deliver much of our educational offerings at events and in-person seminars.
CLM’s capabilities in those areas give us a new way to deliver information and will enable us to touch on hot topics more effectively than we could in the past. The live, in-person approach is a different delivery mechanism that works better for more current and topical content.

We’re interested in helping people do their jobs better, and our tool to do that is knowledge. Our customers will be able to see a more complete set of knowledge products. They’ll get a better solution from us today than they did from either of us before this combination.

CLM also adds the CCP designation in claims and the CLMP designation in litigation management, where they have carved out a good niche. Addressing litigation rounds out our content around claims.

They also bring an extremely dedicated group of volunteers, well-attended conferences, and an advisory panel that helps to ensure content is relevant to working professionals.

R&I: What does this merger mean for members of both The Institutes and CLM?

PM: It means that if you’re in the industry, we can get you content in a time, manner and place of your choosing. And that content is extremely up to date.

We’re interested in helping people do their jobs better, and our tool to do that is knowledge. Our customers will be able to see a more complete set of knowledge products. They’ll get a better solution from us today than they did from either of us before this combination. It’s sort of 1+1=3 from a claims knowledge perspective.

Now that we have expanded delivery capabilities, we’re thinking about how we can leverage it to better fulfill our mission. That could include expanding our offerings at conferences, whether it’s CLM’s annual conference or other industry events. We’ll go about that by looking at what the industry needs, which we’re confident we can understand more completely together.

R&I: How will the two organizations operate going forward?

PM: Because CLM is also focused on education, the integration has been pretty seamless.

For the time being, their designations and educational programs will keep the CLM brand, and we’ll add a note that it belongs to The Institutes’ Risk and Insurance Knowledge Group. Theirs is a very strong brand. They’ve done a phenomenal job since they were founded.

We’ll provide a bit bigger footprint, more resources, and access into the industry, so more people can benefit.
The biggest operational change is that CLM has adopted our not-for-profit classification but making that adjustment has not required anything drastic since they were already focused on education.

R&I: What makes this a “transformative time” for the insurance industry?

PM: We think tech is starting to impact industry more completely than it has in the past, particularly blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI.

I’ve seen many technologies come and go, promising to be the next big thing, but these tools are based on some of those old ideas that have been updated and improved. There’s been an explosion of data in forms we can actually analyze.

Blockchain, AI and IoT are now reaching a point of maturation and will be adopted faster. The confluence of these three technologies is what makes this time unique. Using them together will have a big transformational impact on how we manage risk. &

Katie Dwyer is a freelance editor and writer based out of Philadelphia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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