Often thought of as one of the more traditional sectors, the global insurance industry finds itself in the middle of radical transformation; from legacy to InsurTech. Research conducted by Willis Towers Watson indicated that in 2020 annual InsurTech funding reached an all-time high of just over $7 billion, the highest dollar amount in any year. Like most tales of revolution, there must be a hero. For insurance, that role falls to data. The need for accurate, accessible data touches every aspect of today’s insurance customer journey. This copious amount of data is also required to tackle claims through profiling and predictive modelling, and of course, to develop new and relevant products.
In this piece, we look at three growing trends in the insurance industry, explore how data is shaping these trends and finally, how integration platforms help insurers keep up with industry trends.
The only way for traditional insurance to compete against the emergence of new InsurTechs that are transforming the insurance industry, is to rapidly digitize. Fortunately, a culture of innovation is becoming more commonplace in the insurance sector.
Moving fast does not mean you have to completely move away from using legacy in-house-built systems and services. Instead, insurers are choosing to modernize legacy system by integrating contemporary cloud-based solutions together with their legacy applications This minimises transformational costs and simultaneously limits business disruption risk.
Taking advantage of tried and tested Hybrid Integration Platforms that manages the company's data requirements and provides them with short time to value. Turning to an integration provider is also a safer, faster, and a more effective solution to your business's modernization and automation goals.
With modernization, insurance companies can become more scalable, flexible, and their solutions easier to automate. Investing in a Hybrid Integration Platform to modernize legacy systems will allow insurance companies to better automate processes and enable data to be accessible to the right person, in the right system at the right time.
Another growing trend in insurance is hyper personalization. This makes use of BI and real-time data to deliver content, products and information that are more relevant to the customer. Hyper personalization means tracking and acting on customer data in real time.
There is evidence that some insurance companies are still struggling to get this right. According to a report conducted by Cap Gemini, many insurance companies showed a significant gap in customer expectations and insurer offerings. These finding suggest that urgent action is required if insurers hope to improve.
Customers today want to be instantly recognized, and they also expect the companies they deal with to have immediate access to information about every interaction they have had, on every channel. Insures are also expected to immediately understand their issues and know how to solve them, based on the captured data. This requires a rapid and consolidated view of the customer policies, claims, number of calls, age analysis, outstanding invoices to be paid, etc. Hyper personalization is increasingly being used by insurers to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Working hand-in-hand with hyper personalization, customer centricity has become key to digitally transformed insurance companies. Knowing everything we can about customers means we are able to design customer journeys that are optimized. Making use of data collected from sophisticated customer relationship management systems, means supporting processes can be leveraged to increase the average value per customer over their lifetime.
Customer journeys are particularly useful when looking for specific opportunities for delighting clients. This helps build long-term engagement and loyalty. Mapping customer journeys also helps isolating points where there is increased risk of process failure. This is particularly important in an automated environment and allows insurers to identify when and how clients need to be assisted at high-risk junctures. What’s more, by capturing and analyzing the enormous amounts of data produced along the customer journeys, insurers are able to tweak processes and optimize the entire experience.
It’s clear that data lies at the heart of many key insurance industry trends. However, for far too many insurers, this data lies trapped in silos across the organization. With data locked in archaic legacy systems, how can leaders hope to deliver data insights across their business?
Synatic believes the answer lies in a modern data integration platform. The Synatic Hybrid Integration Platform gives IT leaders access to powerful data management capabilities in a single platform.
Synatic’s platform brings together ETL, integration, API management and data laking into one solution to create a tool that is nimble, simple and powerful. By using the Synatic platform insurance companies can modernize their legacy policy management solutions, integrate their CRM to better understand their customers, build out their data warehouse / lake, or add in APIs to connect customer portals to build a cohesive customer experience.
Working with Synatic will allow insurers to unleash the power of their data to operationalize this data for other systems to use. Once this is achieved, insurers will be best placed to rapidly digitally transform their organization, ensuring sustainability and profitability.
