May 30, 2022

Building a truly digital-ready insurance organization

What does it mean to be digital-ready? You leverage technology to become faster, more efficient, and more competitive in this rapidly moving world.

Technology unlocks superpowers for driving business, with agility and speed touching every aspect of modern business. These factors are the foundation for change, and with digital technologies creating new opportunities, it's time to take full advantage. But, you’ve got to be ready.

 Digital means being fast at everything

So, what do we mean when we talk about speed?

The first thing is of course time to market for existing and new offerings. Research by McKinsey has shown that agility results in 5-7x faster time to market, 20-30 p.p. customer score improvement and 20-25 p.p. improvement in employee engagement.

Then we talk about the speed of the core processes insurers perform, such as claims. Clients spoiled by internet giants expect you to process and handle their requests in seconds and you need to deliver on that expectation. Imagine a major adverse event, like a flood or earthquake. You need to be able to adapt quickly and scale up to process a large number of reports in a very short time.

Last, but not least, we talk about speed and the ability to change quickly. How fast can we adapt to new business and distribution models? Is your technology able to integrate and steer insurtech, data, and customer-partner-facing user experience?

So, this is the meaning of speed.

Get serious about ecosystems and integrate your partners

You’re not in business alone and success requires an ecosystem of employees, brokers, agents, and other partners. But integrating them can be difficult, especially at scale.

It all starts with insurance products. The product design process must provide an easy way to digitalize products rapidly and with minimum overhead. In practice, this means that any new products you design should be immediately available to external systems, such as partners, distribution channels, and others.

AdInsure Studio is a powerful configuration low-code tool that insurance professionals can use to design new products in a visual and intuitive environment. Based on this, our platform automatically generates standards-based APIs that can be accessed by your partners.

This process works both ways. Imagine, you are in the car insurance business and have partnered with a telematics solution provider to offer some type of usage-based insurance model. Your partner’s mobile application or another telematics solution will feed trip recorder data and risk exposure to your core insurance system.

We make it easy for distribution partners and service partners to be integrated into business processes while AdInsure also exposes other processes and features an open integration framework.

The migration to the Cloud

It’s impossible to discuss digitalization and digital transformation without addressing the cloud. Cloud is definitely something we see in every single interaction with potential customers. Every insurer is considering the move and with good reason – cloud delivers agility, scalability and cost effectiveness.

The most feasible approach we see with our clients is a gradual and staged approach that starts with a hybrid infrastructure with a long-term roadmap to migrate to the cloud. This reduces the risk and makes it possible for insurance companies to reap the benefits of the cloud while retaining the security of keeping the core system on the premises.

This was the approach one of our customers took with great success. Their legacy migration project began with our B2B sales portal (UI, dashboards, reports, rating engine, and products designed with our AdInsure Studio low-code tool) hosted in the cloud while the traditional core system remained on-premise.

The second stage was to migrate selected lines of business into the cloud by leveraging the existing insurance product infrastructure of the B2B portal.

That’s a low-risk, high-yield approach.

Low-code/No-code development drives business value

This is an area we identified as a huge opportunity early on and started working on it aggressively. We designed our platform to follow low-code principles, we invest heavily in low-code tools and as a result our tools and platform are praised by industry-leading consultants.

Why is this an important issue? Gartner's research suggests that new products and improved operational agility were the top priorities for insurance IT in 2021. It’s no wonder, since new risks are constantly emerging while insurers struggle to offer and support suitable insurance offerings primarily because of lack of IT support.

Insurance companies, therefore, need to respond faster and low-code/no-code tools are the answer.

AdInsure Studio is our low-code tool that allows non-technical staff to intuitively design new products and then push them out to customers and the entire ecosystem using APIs and a whole range of digital channels. This makes sure that products are ready quickly and distributed just as efficiently. We see that our clients that leverage this attractive tool are able to reduce their turnaround time.

 There is no change without a digital culture

Getting digital-ready is not like flipping a switch. The insurance industry has been around for centuries and it is risk-averse as a rule, which means that cultural change that is required to capitalize on digital initiatives is hard to achieve.

It requires commitment from the top and formal learning and training programs that will disseminate change across an organization.

As a part of AdInsure Academy (our training and education brand), we provide an extensive range of training courses that cover all aspects of change required to switch to a digital-based culture. We teach employees to use AdInsure modules and show them the ropes around our low-code tools that empower business users to design and build new products.

Becoming digital is a journey

Building a digital-ready organization is a journey. It involves many moving parts, from focusing on technological details while sketching out the big business picture to addressing company culture. However, it cannot be put off, digital leaders are already reaping the benefits and accelerating their efforts. This makes any holdouts more vulnerable to disruption from both smaller and larger competitors.

Start by finding a reliable partner. You can always count on Adacta to help you move the needle to your advantage.