In the last few months, the convergence of the shifting geo-political landscape and volatile macro-economic environment has taken centre stage. Understandably the vagaries of Brexit here at home and rising protectionism across the globe have drawn attention to how the world is changing, and fast.
Insurers continue to face a profound transformation agenda, reimagining their businesses in response to changing customer needs and behaviours along with structural pressure from industry economics. Then overlay the more enduring challenges facing insurers – addressing growing retirement savings gap (Millennials outstrip Baby Boomers this year!), serving under-protected customers and businesses, and the rapidly shifting risk landscape. Navigating this landscape takes bravery, insight and a tight planning grip.
Keeping focused on transformation
Whilst insurers need to be plan for uncertainty and be agile to respond, we firmly believe and advise organisations to remain steadfast in their resolve to address the transformation agenda and to build truly connected enterprises. At the heart of making this happen is being able to effectively harness technology as a ‘business model creator’. Indeed, 97 percent of the Insurance CEO’s surveyed by KPMG for the 2018 Global CEO outlook stated that they see technological disruption as an opportunity and 73% were prepared to drive radical technology enabled transformation through their businesses in order to grow.
Thanks to the growing ubiquity of the cloud, the industry’s current players and new entrants have at their disposal affordable and convenient access to the latest technological innovation. This is accelerating the application of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Programming into the value chain from claims settlement to fraud detection and pricing. The focus now is on unlocking functionality from legacy systems and processes, augmenting it with new technology innovations to deliver not only on the cost agenda in the Boardroom, but also the security, innovation and people agenda.
At the core of an organisations’ ability to deploy and apply technology effectively is their competence to acquire, secure and manage data. Indeed truly disruptive models in any industry only emerge when customer intelligence and business insight converge, and data is the key to make this happen. The industry is only now really recognising the importance of data as their number one asset.
How to be successful
As we look ahead, two key areas stand out coupled with the ongoing mega-trend of exponential technology innovation. The first being the emergence of new, unconventional players to the market such as Amazon and secondly, Customer Permissioned Data currency in the wake of GDPR. Whilst the need for innovation and potential for disruption is well chronicled, and organisations have committed this to the board agenda, we believe successful firms will be those who can effectively reassess and reshape their transformation agenda in response to these two areas. Banking has led the way in this space but Insurance is following fast, learning from the Banking sector that change inertia drives huge cost waste, cyber exposure and customer disenfranchisement. The technology is now the easy part, wrapping it into an effective connected enterprise with agile business processes and aligned products is the challenge!
Here more from Will at the ABI Annual Conference 2019. Find out more and book your place now.