First let me state that the concept of “churn rate” is meant to be informative – typically, are the customers or employees happy relative to the same category of people in similar businesses? It is only useful in a business if the metric relates to large numbers, e.g., for competitive utilities like Internet subscriptions, or large employers. In contrast for example, the loss of a customer that makes up a significant percentage of sales vale may not suggest that the perceptions of the market as a whole that the service's value for money is poor – the major customer may have ceased to exist.
In NEA's North American operation it is possible that a NEA subscriber like Geomni may have ceased its subscriptions for another reason, and one unrelated to NEA. Geomni is a Verisk business unit, and via a court ruling, Geomni may be refrained from offering a construction-related service related to a vertical market like roof restoration. I am not saying that the loss of Geomni's subscriotion is not relevant, I am simply saying that it must viewed from the “churn” perspective that suggests North American subscribers are generally un happy with NEA's value for money proposition.
To understand the recent forensic joust between Versign and Eagleview requires some background. Verisk started life as a software company that serviced a number of specific vertical markets, including construction. As online mapping improved, some of the software data could be automated, so via acquisitions Versign got into GIS (Geographic Information Systems), and business construction-design software that could be integrated with GIS. This brought Geomini into the Verisk fold, and another company that had the Xact suite of construction software was acquired and placed under the wing of Geomni. Somewhere along the line, it seems that Eagleview's contruction software was plagiarised, which was what occasioned legal action –
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2019/09/30/541524.htmHaving to pay Eagleview $US125m may have hurt Verisk, but injunctions to not offer a service based on that software may have caused Geomni not to require the NEA service. However, a news partnership with Vexcel has been formed with Verisk being the junior partner (just under 50%), and most of Geomni now falls within that partnership, so it is possible for NEA to recover that business, especially if it can offer the roofing-related stuff it has claimed to have developed. We mushrooms simply do not know what is happening in the backroom.
The above is pure conjecture, but if you poke about the Internet you can satisfy yourself if my conjecture has any value.
