[:en]There are over 3 billion people connected to the internet right now, via any kind of device and connection. The word “Digital” influences every part of our daily life, from the office to home.
The wide digital revolution we are embracing is confirmed by the fact that[pullquote position=”right”] today digital permeates everything: from art to economy, going through sports, currencies and, of course, Insurers.[/pullquote] Once everything becomes entirely digital, there will be no real need to specify it as such anymore.
Thus, as new technologies keep on emerging, every organization has to adapt in order to meet the new digital customers’ demands and expectations. The digitalization of customers’ behavior, using new channels and devices, is requiring also the Insurance industry to deal with these massive revolution challenges.
The digital transformation is at the top of the agenda for any company. Following the B2C business trends, some Insurance Software Vendors are catching up with other industries and platforms, such as social networks like Facebook and Pinterest, e-commerce websites like Booking and Amazon, and Apps, in order to support the Insurers Legacy IT Systems Modernization journey through a bimodal approach that matches traditional systems with digital innovations.
In fact, even though the constraint IT budgets do not allow the Insurance System replacement, Insurers are modernizing and upgrading their IT systems. In doing so, Software Vendors represent a reliable partner to gain the best advantages from this disruptive Digitalization and, when strategically planned and properly managed, modernizing custom legacy applications could be a low-risk and cost-effective way to maximize digital investments.
As of today, the CIOs’ main challenges are to address the digital initiatives, such as design smart Front Ends, create innovative insurance products and services, develop Mobile apps and integrate digital tools. All of this is happening because CIOs are planning to renew the architecture and legacy ecosystems in terms of digitalization in the long-term Insurers’ strategies. From this point of view, the main Insurance industry goal is to find the better trade-off between these two goals: the current legacy modernization in view of a total insurers digitalization.
The new Policy Administration Systems (PAS) can be introduced in parallel with existing Legacy systems in order to further extend the capabilities of the overall system. This evolutionary path allows to gradually replace existing legacy systems minimizing the impact on the end user, enabling the company to exploit the digital revolution and address future market requirements.
A modern PAS empowers Insurers’ customer centricity initiatives and optimizes business processes for a shorter time-to-market, focusing on distribution, added value services, and value chain efficiency. The upgrade in insurance distribution models is the real revolution that comes from the disruptive digitalization world: the insured person can now access to insurance products and services through any channel and device, making the whole experience way faster and more practical.
With the omnichannel approach and omnidevice Front Ends, the Insurer, just like the final client, is always more oriented to the bespoke software solutions, lightweight and specifically designed to meet his needs. In this way, a tailor-made PAS is designed with a user friendly and intuitive usability, thus allowing to optimize the business from a simultaneous management of multiple policies to the “customized” functionalities, depending on the insurer agent rather than broker needs. More in detail, modern PAS gives a completely new customer experience bringing all the necessary functions, such as agenda, e-mail, and every line of business polices integrated with device functionalities such (camera, GPS etc), to their homepage board.
Thus, the extreme usability inspired by socials and B2C web portals will reflect on a highly flexible and open architecture that provides the agility to support the so-called Big Data coming from socials, videogames, wearables, and, in general, any kind of device that enables the Insurer to easily launch different products and services.
[pullquote position=”right”]In the next future, the new Policy Administration will be able to provide automated, algorithm-based facilities by leveraging predictive models and other external sources, integrating information coming from the IoT, wearable and Smart devices[/pullquote]. Insurers will leverage on Software Vendors expertise to exploit off-the-shelf predictive models, without having to face the big challenges coming from Big Data world.
By 2020 the winning insurance firms will be those that are now embracing a holistic approach that is future-oriented and considers the current enterprise goals. The best results will come from leveraging the most innovative FinTech (Financial Technology) solutions to accelerate their digital strategy.
IoT, wearable devices, predictive models, analytics and Big Data are all a huge opportunity. The future should start at some point, and the moment to make it happen is now.[:it][:]
