Interview with Michael Kelly, CEO, FINEOS by Enterprise Ireland for The Market Winter 2012.
Software company FINEOS had 250,000,000 reasons to be cheerful with a recent milestone in export sales. The decision to boost R&D spending during the downturn means the company can be confident of more growth into the future.
FINEOS seems to have taken to heart the lesson about never letting a good recession go to waste. The Dublin headquartered company chose to increase its investment in R&D on its claims management software in the teeth of the economic downturn, which saw some of its customers almost go to the wall while FINEOS itself retrenched, reducing staff numbers. Since then, the market has started to turn around. “Slowly we’re seeing purse strings opening and spend happening,” says CEO and founder Michael Kelly. Many of FINEOS’ existing customers are set to upgrade their systems over the next 18 months, and the new features are intended to address customers’ needs for a standard system with web capabilities ‘baked in’, he says.
FINEOS sells primarily to two main sectors: insurance providers and government agencies
that handle injury and illness compensation schemes. While flying mostly below the publicity radar at home, it has built up a business that recently reached a milestone of €250,000,000 in software and services exports achieved over the past decade. In the last 12 months alone, FINEOS Claims handled €2 billion of insurance claims payments, and the company estimates that 40 million claims are now in its system worldwide.
