TECHNOLOGY

THINKING BIG

With an eye on the future,
AMS parent company changes name to Vertafore

By Nancy Doucette

Euan Menzies, President and CEO of Vertafore, says creating a new name at the parent level paves the way for the organization’s expansion plans.

As the top executive of an organization, you need to be part medical practitioner and part clairvoyant. You need to be able to measure the pulse of the market you serve and, at the same time, see around the corner to anticipate new opportunities.

Euan Menzies has been doing that for some time and most recently, he’s been using those skills in his position as president and CEO of AMS. But if you were to look at his business card today, it says he’s president and CEO of Vertafore.

What gives?

“We’re not losing the AMS name. We’re not abandoning the AMS Services brand name, or AMS Rackley, or Silverplume, or Allenbrook. Instead, by changing the corporate entity name to Vertafore, we’re reflecting that as we go forward, we’ll expand beyond the core AMS market sector,” Menzies explains.

“The risk with any brand is that you try to do too much with it,” he continues. “At the core, AMS is a fabulous brand. It has tremendous identity within the independent insurance agent community as well as within the broader property and casualty insurance community in the U.S. The brand awareness and equity have been built up over 35 years.”

Menzies notes that having the parent name be the same as the product names creates an incorrect impression that the products are in some way subordinate or subsidiary to the AMS brand. “We view AMS Services, AMS Rackley, Silverplume, and Allenbrook as sister brands to AMS, not subsidiary brands, and by using the name AMS on multiple levels, there was some confusion around that.”

So, almost two years ago, Menzies and the presidents of the individual business units began working with a New York City-based brand advocacy firm to examine how to leverage and at the same time simplify the AMS branding structure. “We agreed that we could continue to be successful for the foreseeable future running things as we’ve been running them,” he recalls. “But that, over time, we’d need to be sure that the AMS brand is extremely focused. That would enable the parent company to do speculative and different activities, and that those activities would be identified under a different name. We decided to start moving in that direction and the end result was the announcement this past August of our new corporate identity: Vertafore.”

Deciding to adopt a new corporate parent name involved more than just Menzies and the management team. He says that key people within AMS Services were heavily involved as well. “This gives them complete ownership of the AMS Services name,” he explains. “They’re comfortable with having a non-AMS parent name that’s pointed at different but similar communities.”

Some of the members of the Vertafore executive leadership include (from left) Dominique Laborde, Chief Technology Officer; James Calabrese, Chief Financial Officer; Mary Anne Tillona, SVP, General Counsel; and Peter B. Zale, CIC, VP, Business Development.

He notes that the time for an organization to make a change such as this is when it doesn’t actually need to. The time may come when expansion plans take the organization outside its traditional area of operation, and when it gets into that new area of operation, he points out, there may already be another organization there with the same name. “As we looked at our expansion plans in the future—some of these are in focus and some are in the ‘dim and distant’ on the horizon—there are some things that we’d potentially like to do where the name AMS is not the appropriate name for the parent organization to use,” Menzies explains.

He acknowledges that Vertafore with its AMS Services agency management systems, Silverplume, AMS Rackley, and Allenbrook products has a very good understanding of the U.S. insurance market. The organization has an equally good understanding of how to provide strong solutions to small business owners—in particular, insurance agents. In terms of understanding the needs of small business owners, he says the skills are transferable. In reflecting on the possibility that at some point Vertafore might offer solutions to other small business communities, Menzies says: “This wasn’t part of the decision to rebrand the parent but if I looked at the skill sets, I’d say we’re well-suited for offering solutions to small business owners. At this point, though, we plan on sticking to insurance. There are plenty of opportunities.”

Case in point: benefits. At the AMS Users’ Group 2004 conference last April, AMS Services rolled out an expanded employee benefits offering. Menzies notes: “Our customers were saying: ‘Benefits is a growing part of my business. You need to give me more tools in the management system to support that part of the business.’”

AMS Services hired an employee benefits specialist with more than 30 years’ experience in the insurance industry to design the AMS Benefits Workflow. “We came at it initially from a property and casualty, management system-centric perspective,” Menzies points out. “Over time, we may look at benefits solutions for classic benefits brokers or agents, and we may find that the AMS name isn’t appropriate for that space. So here again, we needed to create a new corporate parent name.”

He emphasizes: “Not only are we going to continue to do all the things that we’ve done historically that have made us successful, but we’re going to look at doing some new things. So it’s not a case of moving our attention away from what we do; it’s making sure that we pay attention to all those things and also begin to think more expansively for the future.”

Having the benefit of perspective, Menzies points out that five years from now there is going to be something new and different that will be important to property/casualty agents—something that will be important to their livelihood, important to their survival and the growth of their business. “With Vertafore having a broader footprint, we can take a look at some of these opportunities and potentially accelerate the time to market with new product innovation because we can acquire a business that’s already doing those sorts of things outside the P-C space or we can bring some of the product development perspectives to bear and move it more quickly.”

Menzies concludes that changing the corporate name to Vertafore won’t have a direct day-to-day impact on the end users of the various AMS products. “People shouldn’t view this as anything more than a sign that the individual products are healthy and doing well. Additionally, we want to make sure that as we’re going forward, there’s no administrative, operational or legal hurdle from a brand perspective that will slow us down.” *

For more information:
Vertafore
Web site: www.vertafore.com