Category: CertFocus

Leadership Spotlight: New Vertikal COO Robert Rodriguez Brings Robust Knowledge and Experience

Welcome to the first Vertikal Leadership Spotlight. Today, we introduce you to Robert Rodriguez, who has joined Vertikal as our new COO. Robert comes to Vertikal bringing more than 25 years of technical and operations experience in the computer software industry. He has degrees in Business Information Systems from the University of Phoenix. His experience and leadership have been focused on developing and delivering technology-driven business services and solutions, providing outstanding client service, and driving profitable revenue growth for the companies he has served.

Robert is a seasoned expert with extensive experience managing complex software and service implementations. Under Robert’s leadership and vision, the industry’s first commercially successful insurance compliance product was introduced to market. Early in his long career, he spent nine years with Insurance Data Services (IDS) as Director of Information Technology, where he successfully led a team in the development and commercial introduction of one of the industry’s first certificate of insurance tracking software applications.

Following the 2007 acquisition of IDS by Ebix, Inc., Robert was promoted to Vice President of Operations, where he managed the combined operations and technology of the Ebix BPO Risk Compliance Solutions division. He later served as Vice President of Operations for Registry Monitoring Insurance Services.

Robert comes to Vertikal from Exigis, where he was Partner and COO. In that role, he was responsible for overseeing all areas of operations and delivering innovative, cost-effective business solutions to clients in support of risk management and contractor/vendor on-boarding and compliance efforts. In addition, he has integrated new and existing technology ideas to streamline processes to improve effectiveness and efficiency cost savings.

He is also highly experienced in financial management, human resources, business analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), and account management. His unique blend of technical, operations management, and customer relations expertise will enable him to successfully implement value-driven and scalable insurance compliance operations for Vertikal.

Robert is a builder, engager, and mobilizer of teams to capitalize on individual strengths and inspire outstanding performance. He prides himself on creating an environment of opportunity, while also restructuring and reorganizing suboptimal business processes to improve cost structures and profitability.

Current Vertikal COO, Lisa Deatherage, will be transitioning into a new role within the company, Client Advocate. In this role, Lisa will utilize her 22 years in the business to help drive client experience and increase value from the Vertikal offerings. Lisa brings her wealth of client knowledge to the role to deliver the best customer experience in the industry.

We welcome Robert and wish Lisa the best in her new leadership role at Vertikal.

About Vertikal

Vertikal provides certificates of insurance and prequalification solutions that help your organization rise above risk. We work hard to stay ahead and develop cutting-edge technological solutions and services that help you move beyond reactivity toward a more strategic level of risk management. Vertikal streamlines and automates even your most complex, labor-intensive risk management processes with flexible, intuitive, secure reporting systems that are easy to use.

Contact us to learn more about how Vertikal will make your risk management strategy more successful.

Democratize data with a simple, secure reporting tool

Companies don’t lack for risk management data. Valuable business intelligence (BI) about vendors, suppliers and third-party contractors continually streams into organizations from myriad sources and systems. What many do lack, however, is a secure, simple way to access, integrate, analyze and deliver that data so people across the organization can make informed decisions and manage risk effectively.

Generate and share reports based on real-time data faster

Vertikal empowers your company’s staff to turn data into appropriate action in an instant with improved dashboards and reporting features that are easy for anyone to use. And you can still control who gets to access what with customizable security for sensitive data.

• Agile and responsive access to real-time data
• Fast display of metrics and reports
• Visualized charts and graphs

Enhanced features for simple, secure reporting

Vertikal’s reporting tool enables teams to build dashboards and process reports easily—no technical skills or coding knowledge required. Employees can configure, generate and share reports quickly and securely with each other, clients, business partners and regulatory agencies. Extensive data governance, data- and field-level security, and group and role-based security options are built in.

Employees throughout an organization can use Vertikal’s enhanced data export and reporting features to help the company effectively manage the insurance, financial and safety requirements of your business ecosystem. Generate and share more thorough, timely reports faster:

• Export key vendor, supplier and client information from ERP, RMIS, A/P, contract management and other systems
• Generate dynamic ad-hoc reports backed by real-time data
• Visualize compliance data to pinpoint and assess risk proactively
• Demonstrate compliance for more advantageous insurance terms
• Generate standard and uniquely configured reports (scheduled and exportable)
• Set up custom KPIs and analytics

About Vertikal

Vertikal provides certificates of insurance and prequalification solutions that help your organization rise above risk. We work hard to stay ahead and develop cutting-edge technological solutions and services that help you move beyond reactivity toward a more strategic level of risk management. Vertikal streamlines and automates even your most complex, labor-intensive risk management processes with flexible, intuitive, secure reporting systems that are easy to use.

Contact us to learn more about how Vertikal will make your risk management strategy more successful.

Share Actionable Data Seamlessly with Vertikal’s Improved Reporting Tool – Coming Soon

Your business may have hundreds of connections to different technology platforms, feeding you valuable business intelligence (BI) about your vendors, suppliers, and third-party contractors. As a result, your incoming data sets need the required integrations into your systems and processes. Empowering more people in your organization to connect with your information assets no matter where they’re hosted is critical to ensuring successful risk management.

Now, with Vertikal’s improved reporting tool, our clients gain enhanced data reporting features that empower your risk management capabilities even more. Whether your users need to export critical vendor information, generate dynamic ad-hoc reports, or visualize data related to where they may have gaps in compliance, Vertikal empowers your staff to turn data into appropriate action instantly. That’s the power we deliver with Vertikal’s improved reporting tool — coming to users in August of this year.

Vertikal uses an API-led approach to simplify the integration process that makes hundreds of connections to your technologies and required endpoints. In this way, Vertikal’s business intelligence platform allows your team to access, integrate and report data from multiple systems. From enterprise resource planning (ERP) and risk management information systems (RMIS) to accounts payable (A/P), contract management, and everything in between, you can rely on Vertikal’s open design to provide the hub that connects it all.

Put BI Data on Your Side

Vertikal provides an agile approach to dashboards and reports, so even less technically focused team members can easily pull and use data. Internal stakeholders can now build reports and dashboards without code, and easily, quickly, and securely share these with clients and partners.

We are thrilled to announce these improvements so our clients can demonstrate and manage compliance thoroughly with statistics and data visualization about their compliance tracking. That is an integral part of negotiating their insurance rates and contributes to savings on premiums.

In summary, our improved data reporting tool enables your teams to implement actionable BI data with your business systems and platforms to deliver greater operational intelligence. In addition, our enhanced analytics capabilities also deliver improved staff efficiency and productivity.

Implement Robust New Features

The improved automation and outreach capabilities in our improved reporting tool center on three key components:

Ease of use: Our improved reporting tool is accessible to everyone, providing an agile, self-service platform requiring no coding knowledge.

A complete platform: The platform includes data visualization, web dashboards, data export, and data level security. Vertikal provides the full package of robust BI and reporting tools that our clients need.

Data security: Whenever internal stakeholders build reports and dashboards without code, they can quickly and securely share these with clients and partners. Our improved reporting tool includes extensive data governance and security, data and field level security, group and role-based security, and all the flexibility our customers need.

About Vertikal

Vertikal provides certificates of insurance and prequalification solutions that help your organization rise above risk. We work hard to stay ahead and develop cutting-edge technological solutions and services that help you move beyond reactivity toward a more strategic level of risk management. Vertikal streamlines and automates even your most complex, labor-intensive risk management processes with flexible, intuitive, secure reporting systems that are easy to use.

Contact us to learn more about how Vertikal will make your risk management strategy more successful.

The Construction Financial Management Association (CFMA) Annual Conference and Exhibition took place on May 14th – 18th in Atlanta, GA at the Hyatt Regency. The CFMA has a longstanding reputation as the sole organization dedicated to providing financial professionals with unparalleled career development and networking opportunities.

The event delivered a great opportunity for construction financial professionals to become even better at what they do by attending sessions offering introduction level courses for those new to the industry, and also advanced courses to keep those with a bit more experience fully engaged. The event featured something for everyone.

About Vertikal

Vertikal provides certificate of insurance and pre-qualification solutions that help your organization rise above risk. Vertikal streamlines and automates even your most complex, labor-intensive risk management processes with flexible, intuitive, secure reporting systems that are easy to use.

This year, our Vice President of Sales, Allison Shearer and other members of the Vertikal team met with a large number of risk management and other professionals at the various CFMA conference events and inside our Vertikal booth. Allison is an experienced sales executive with documented successes in certificate of insurance management, third party pre-qualification services and business process automation disciplines.

In case you were unable to attend, we are so sorry to have missed you. Below are some of the insights that Vertikal’s Vice President, Allison Shearer, and her team shared with visitors to Vertikal’s booth at the CFMA Conference and Exhibition.

How can you hold your vendors, suppliers and third-party contractors to a higher standard?

Vertikal helps you understand the risk that the vendor, supplier and third-party contractor brings to your business, and presents you with risk ratings and scores to help you understand whether or not you should be working with the subcontractor. Vertikal also gives you the flexibility to choose from full-service or self-service options. Plus, you gain the opportunity to collaborate with industry-certified experts on challenging issues.

How can Vertikal help reduce the time, cost and effort it takes to manage your complex vendor relationships?

Our user-friendly solutions and expert support provide you with everything you need to increase transparency across your vendor, supplier and contractor relationships.

What are the latest updates on Vertikal’s solutions, including CertFocus, PreQual and ShieldCor?

• CertFocus delivers a dynamic Certificate of Insurance (COI) tracking software that leverages Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and machine learning technologies to help organize, simplify and monitor subcontractor COI tracking and compliance.
• PreQual combines dynamic software with expert financial analysis to bring a new level of transparency to your outside business relationships without disrupting your existing processes and workflows.
• ShieldCor helps you spot new opportunities and deeper risk insights to optimize your operational infrastructure, so you can base key decisions on timely, accurate and reliable information.

Vertikal delivers the tools organizations need to rise above risk and adapt to a rapidly transforming world. We work hard to stay ahead and develop cutting edge technological solutions and services that help you move beyond reactivity towards a more strategic level of risk management.

Contact us to learn more about how Vertikal will make your risk management strategy more successful.

CertFocus is very pleased to announce the hiring of Sidney (Sid) Fein in the Chief Technology Officer role. A highly skilled, results-driven transformation leader, Sid is an adept value-creator and a welcomed addition to the CertFocus executive team.

In bringing Sid on board, CertFocus has invested in a CTO that will enhance our software. He brings extensive technology skills in Application Development, Infrastructure, Cloud Computing, Data Management and Security to his new role. Sid will implement new features and functionality, fuel additional services and increase the efficiency of operations for our valued clients.

Technology powers the CertFocus service, and Sid will help improve and enable new tech. Sid’s focus will be on accelerating product development, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of our services for our clients, and enhancing our integration capabilities. Finally, Sid  will be working on enhancing the CertFocus business intelligence offerings to deliver real-time, actionable data to our valued clients, and pursuing new relationships with vendors to develop strategic technology partnerships.

“We owe it to our customers to bring on a demonstrated leader with the unequivocal technology expertise and proven accomplishments that Sid brings to our company,” says CertFocus CEO Joseph V. Sforzo of hiring Sidney Fein. “With Sid as a key executive in our company, our customers will see tremendous dividends.”

Prior to joining CertFocus, Sid was at LifeMed Media, where he built co-branded world- class SaaS solutions for major business partners such as Aetna, Humana and Bayer. His 25 years of experience and knowledge in development database admin, infrastructure operations, security, quality control, and hands-on all-in testing is remarkable.

With an Executive MBA from Hofstra and an undergraduate degree from NYU Stern, Sid’s experience in implementing new product features make him a powerful addition to the CertFocus team.