We used to have a joke around the office that you needed to work at KCIC for at least five years before you could explain to your mother what KCIC does and what your job entails. It was true. For a relatively small business, we weren’t able to simply describe the myriad ways we serve our clients and the benefits we provide. Lately, however, we’ve focused on streamlining how we explain our impact.
We now can concisely answer the question, “What does KCIC do?” — we help companies manage their product liabilities. Since we do that in a variety of ways, we have organized our services into three areas, or “rails” — finding inspiration in the engineering of rail systems, in which the separate rails are independent but also dependent on one another. Most importantly, the rails are all headed in the same direction: directly towards helping our clients manage their product liabilities.
KCIC began in 2002 as a consulting firm offering traditional insurance consulting services — founded on the premise of helping companies maximize the value of their insurance assets. We began using our consulting expertise and leading-edge technology for modeling the economics and litigation risks of the most complicated coverage programs, and we rapidly added an array of other services to complement that core skill. This was the origin of our left rail: Traditional Consulting Services, which now encompasses expert testimony, credit analysis, proof of underlying exhaustion, insurance policy analysis, data conversion and normalization, and insurance allocations.
From the start of our business, we would undertake normalizing and converting very messy databases into one succinct data set. We became so good at it that when, some years later, we were asked by a client to take on the administration of their asbestos-related personal injury claims, we were ready for the challenge. From the start, our organizing principle was that everything should be in one place, with a well-designed database and an easy-to-use portal that allows all users to get what they need from the system when they need it. Data should be centralized, but data gathering should be decentralized. Our approach was very successful, and we added client after client. Our extensive growth in this area led us to completely rewrite our online platforms using the latest and most powerful programming languages. The result is what we call our “Ligado Platform.”
This is our right rail: Platform-Related Consulting Services. These services are deployed for clients that have a long-term need to deal with an ongoing liability problem, typically in the tort system, but also from contractual indemnifications and warranties.
At some point, we woke up to the fact that we had become a technology company, as well as a consulting firm. One of the secrets of our success with technology is that we are entirely self-sufficient. We develop and design all of our platforms and software in-house. We don’t believe in having a technology back office — we want our technologists front and center, talking to clients and hearing about their problems first hand.
One thing led to another and we learned that combining our consulting skills with our ability to deploy technology quickly put us in demand to solve all sorts of problems, oftentimes in quite different spaces from where we had traditionally operated. Some projects required us to clean up years of historical data and deploy custom processes and platforms very quickly. As we have taken on more of these projects, we have identified certain common characteristics, including:
And so our third rail was born: Custom Solutions.
Taken as a whole, the three rails support each other and take us in the same direction. The destination is helping our clients tackle their product liability problems by implementing solutions in truly transformational ways.
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Jonathan Terrell is the Founder and President of KCIC. He has more than 30 years of international financial services experience with a multi-disciplinary background in accounting, finance and insurance. Prior to founding KCIC in 2002, he worked at Zurich Financial Services, JP Morgan, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
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