6 critical tech platform features take you from zip to ZING!
BY DAVID MISORSKI
Driven by their experiences with Amazon, Netflix and other digital customer experience leaders, policyholders now expect more from their insurers than at any point in history. More personalized options to choose from, easy-to-understand policies, and non-invasive medical exams are top of mind. Throw in rewards for maintaining healthy habits, and you have an advantage.
Life and health brokers who address their client’s needs and expectations by embracing technology and working with tech-savvy carriers will take the lead. As a broker, you can set yourself apart as a digital leader in a rapidly changing market that’s rife with insurtechs and other new entrants. Giving your customers what they really want is critical to keeping an edge.
Here’s how to prepare for the future
As is the case in retail and banking, the fastest-growing life insurance companies are tech driven. Their vision is more encompassing than just an app or a network. Successful companies ask the bigger “what if” questions and use technology to answer them quickly, which attracts more talent and gives them an edge over the competition. Creating an innovative, agile work environment can enable you to turn ambitious ideas into reality.
Faced with the accelerating pace of digital transformation, two distinct approaches have come to the foreground in life insurance. Which one can help your organization? Will you continue to invest in traditional, conventional ideas that focus on risk? Or is it time to shift your focus to speed and agility by embracing technology?
The life insurance agents who focus on the latter are the future winners: they’re digital-ready leaders and share many similar traits in technology.
Carriers AND agents should look for these six features when choosing a technology platform:
- Open system. A system must enable unfettered, inbound and outbound interactions through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) while being easily adaptable and flexible to business needs. This openness makes unifying backend operational data and processes or powering up with third-party data and apps a breeze for life insurers.
- Customer-centric. Life insurers are finding advantages in using platforms that permit the introduction of any product in any channel — and sold to any customer — using thousands of open-source APIs. Ideally, the technology also provides low-code tools and leverages AI-assisted automation to blend channels into a unified or “channelless” experience, whether B2C, B2B or B2B2C.
- Cost effective. Here’s a great tip: By letting you shift capital expenditures to operating expenses, a leading coretech platform can promote cost predictability and reduce risk, which lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) and generates a faster return on investment (ROI). Coretech is the logical combination of insurance core systems with cloud-native technologies and architecture.
- Cloud native. Unlike modern legacy solutions, which are built around policies and not the customer, cloud-native platforms give insurers a complete view of the customer and therefore can help you better satisfy their needs and wants. This is accomplished with secure microservice architectures, containerization, event-driven capabilities, and rapid scale.
- SaaS delivered. Software As A Service (SaaS) delivery empowers life insurers to focus on their core business and lean on a proven technology platform to provide performance, reliability, security and compliance in a package with predictable pricing and the ability to grow. SaaS is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. It is also known as “on-demand software” and Web-based/Web-hosted software.
- DevOps enabled. To support new technology for your business, you need system adaptability to keep up with inevitable demands for change. For rapid implementation, innovation, and transformation, life insurers have been turning to DevOps. DevOps increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: It allows you to evolve and improve products faster than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This enables fast and low-cost product launches, non-disruptive upgrades, automated builds and continuous agile cycles that integrate, deploy and deliver new or updated products. Platforms with coretech technology provide DevOps that reduce life insurers’ IT training needs and increase management efficiency through cross-platform Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC).
Does this sound too techie and way above your head?
If so, look to experts to advise you sooner rather than later. Digital transformation won’t wait. It’s already here, and more change is on the way. The ability to reimagine customer journeys and accelerate experiences will determine life insurance industry winners and losers. As a result, an ambitious insurer’s single most decisive differentiator for today and tomorrow is agility.
Being prepared and staying ahead of the curve requires a change in mindset, which isn’t easy and requires a conscious effort. As customer expectations evolve, insurers with a bold vision will create a true digital transformation that helps them stand out among competitors, stay relevant and successfully grow their organizations.
DAVID MISORSKI is VP of Life & Annuity, EIS Ltd. With more than 20 years of experience, David has a comprehensive knowledge of the financial services industry, including retirement plans, pension risk transfer, investments, and institutional annuities. Contact: www.eisgroup.com