Over the last years, the concept of ecosystems has become an increasingly important business strategy for companies across all industries. Especially in the insurance sector, being involved in an interconnected set of services or a network of companies working together has become an excellent opportunity to provide better or more advanced solutions, increase the penetration across markets, and produce higher value for clients and customers.
There are different ways of being involved in an ecosystem, which can be summarized in two main roles:
– orchestration: a company assembles various services into single and integrated customer journeys, thanks to complementary services and add-on features and functionalities offered by its partners. The quality of the orchestrator is leadership, as well as the ability to build successful collaborations and benefit from them.
– participation: a company that participates in existing ecosystems orchestrated by other players, often to gain access to new sources of lead generation. The partners benefit from being part of the ecosystem, enhancing its scope and attractiveness in the market.
In both ways, ecosystem-based models in insurance typically enable interactions across the value chain, in order to provide a broader range of service offering and, richer customer experiences, resulting in strong added-value solutions for clients, and higher rates of automation or digitalization.
As outlined also in a recent report on Ecosystems in insurance by EY, the typical benefits of being involved in a partners ecosystem for insurers are: enhance the company agility; access new or enhanced capabilities; increase operational efficiency; accelerate innovation; improve ability to scale; reduce operating costs and higher margins.
In addition, having a set of partners reduces production timings and speeds up the implementation of products and services, resulting in improved time to market for the company as well.
To provide an example, the report presents the case of Nationwide, a leading US insurer that used an ecosystem model and extensive InsurTech collaboration with EY Nexus for Insurance, launching an entirely new digital business focused on millennials within only seven months. Moreover, another leading example was provided during the Celent Model Insurer Awards, in which RGI was mentioned for Customer Experience Transformation, as the winner of “Model Insurer of the year”, which is AXA XL, was chosen exactly for its “Construction Ecosystem”.
In the last years, our Group entered an ongoing path towards creating its own ecosystem, expanding its international partner network – and in the last few months accelerated this process with new strategic collaborations with different local players across Europe.
First of all, in late 2020 Novum-RGI announced a new cooperation with U-Centrix, a Slovenian software provider for cloud-based solutions. This technological partnership, which sees the combination of U-Centrix technologies on the Novum Cloud Platform, is aimed at enabling the group to expand its offer, allowing its clients to meet the highest security and compliance requirements, while both reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction.
Then, RGI ambitious growth strategy continues in Italy and France in 2021, with other technologic and commercial partnerships with local players.
Firstly, in February RGI and C Consulting S.p.A., Italian leader for reinsurance and regulatory software solutions for insurance and reinsurance companies, announced their partnership to accelerate their development in the property and casualty, life, claims in the insurance markets, sectors in strong demand for technological innovation and digital transformation. This partnership completes RGI’s and C Consulting’s existing offering range, wider the customer base and strengthens the respective international positioning and development. Moreover, seen from an international perspective, it also makes available to EMEA insurance companies the result of more than a decade history of integrations between the two systems already successfully delivered in Italy.
Secondly, in France KAPIA-RGI partnered with JUMP, a software provider specializing in investment management.
The two players, that had already been working together for 10 years and had several shared clients, created a new synergy that both enriches RGI offering and provide better services to clients in terms of technology. In fact, this partnership allows to automate order management processes and optimize asset/liability matching, resulting in their users’ value addition, thanks to shared roadmaps, simple joint deployments, and sustained profitability between asset and liability tools.
Finally, we just announced a new strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s leading cloud. The partnership will further accelerate our transition to the cloud, as well as enhance the experience for RGI insurance customers by securely using our services in EMEA. This partnership will also help us to accelerate the transformation of the insurance industry post-Covid-19, where further adoption of the cloud can enhance insurance customers’ experience, facilitate remote business or virtual agencies, increase the speed of response to new needs or critical issues, and reduce operating costs.
These partnerships show how recently RGI started a continuous journey towards the creation of an ecosystem of international partners, aimed at both extending its offer with best-of-breed market solutions that respond to clients’ and customers’ needs – as for the above-mentioned partnerships with U-Centrix, C-Consulting and Jump, which offer vertical products that complete our offer – and exploiting the most advanced technologies, such as the ones offered by the latest partnership with AWS.
We believe that the implementation of these strategic partnerships is essential to meet the challenges set by a fast-changing market in terms of technology and innovations, as well as to maintain our leadership position as an innovative player in digital transformation of the insurance sector.
