4 New Developments in the Insurance Space taking the Industry by Storm
Written by Olivia Klayman, Marketing & Corporate Communications Analyst at Systech
COVID-19 takes no prisoners. Even insurance firms — theoretical experts in crisis planning and risk analysis — had never encountered a disaster of this magnitude. What’s more, they were left with an impossible decision: make good on all pandemic-related insurance claims or risk a major (and likely irreputable) blow to their reputation.
Despite the damage it caused; the global pandemic strengthened the industry as a whole. The crisis held a mirror to organizational inefficiencies and vulnerabilities, prompting them to accelerate their path to a more digital and technology driven future. This journey would set them on a path of profit and sustainable competitive advantage in years to come.
A recent study identified that “15% of survey takers say they are likely to purchase life insurance due to the impact of COVID-19 [with a] 37% fear that the pandemic may bring future financial impact on their retirement plan” (PWC). Now the time is ripe for Insurance firms to capitalize on it.
Here are four new developments taking the insurance industry by storm…
Invest in Diversity and Technology. Investing in the future of insurance is not limited to stock portfolios, but also includes a more inclusive and diverse work environment. Data reports find that the healthcare industry, for example, were able to correlate a higher number of female employees with a propensity to outperform their competition by upwards of 18 percentage points. Many studies have validated that a diverse workplace speaks to their values and market share, alike.
Digital Transformation Acceleration. The global pandemic thrusted insurance firms into a fully remote lifestyle, without the technological investment to support the transition. The crisis has bolstered the necessity for businesses to be built on the digitization and automation of their data. This change has already generated a lot of growth opportunities in areas such as selling, servicing, and customer relationship building. If firms would like to continue this growth trajectory, they will have to adopt a modernized framework that enables efficient and informed decision making.
Systech Solutions offers legacy modernization designed to support strategical, technological, and digital transformation journey. This not only helps build customer retention, but also allows businesses to offer personalized customer service solutions to each individual customer. What’s more, migrating to an agile cloud infrastructure helps build a resilient architecture that allows businesses to to support their growing business requirements and to speed their products to market..
Operational Enablement drives innovation. The alignment of technology, processes, and people help fortify clear and strategic initiatives in every sector of the business. In fact, operational enablement may be one of the most effective ways to support innovation efforts. Many firms have already turned their attention toward digital customer interaction at every level of their insurance journey. Specifically, they’ve begun to “augment their underwriting through the use of new data sources and decision models [while also] investing in improving data capture and ingestion, especially with regard to unstructured data such as audio and video.” The dissemination of information plays a powerful role in addressing the surge of remote work and data capture relating to claims, submissions, and concerns.
COVID-19 validated the importance of “digital-first” strategies. It’s also exasperated the demand for seamless customer service and touchless claims. Commercial insurers, for example, have already invested in remote risk identification with the hopes that it will allow customers to use imaging more effectively for underwriting risk and policy eligibility. These changes toward a greater sense of visibility into processes and functions is conducive to building trust and loyalty between firms and customers. While these policies are not entirely new, there is no doubt that the scale and speed has picked up significantly.
AI/ML supports alignment of firms and carriers. The more closely a firm is aligned to the needs of their partners, the better positioned they are for the years to come. Whether innovation in areas of underwriting, customer experience, or claims, their performance will be largely contingent on how accurately their offerings address demand. AI/ML can be extremely helpful in supporting this initiative.
Systech Solutions offers an extensive number of B2B solutions designed to complement the carrier’s value chain. Dopplr™ — their “Intelligence Anywhere” platform — transforms raw data into data-driven decisions to help businesses forecast, predict, and prescribe actionable insights in near real-time. This technological can be instrumental in an insurance firm’s ability to offer the newest and best to maintain a technological advantage over their competition, while also ensuring carrier-insurance loyalty down the line.
Looking ahead: the insurance industry at a glance. The global pandemic highlighted the weaknesses and strengths of all industries, alike. The insurance industry, specifically, highlighted a dire need to innovate and modernize in all sense of the word. These developments have helped insurance companies address changes in customer loyalty to carriers, attitudes toward each sector of insurance, and their service preferences, and work them in their benefit.
Whether revamping their data analytics infrastructure to support finicky customers — or championing an employee staff as diverse as the community as they service — there’s no doubt that firms are gearing up for a long and profitable future in the years to come…
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