Insurance is witnessing rapid shifts in customer demand , and as such needs brisk innovation and adaptation across various functions such as new product development, underwriting, claims processing, customer experience, sales and distribution. Can Low-Code Platforms enable the innovation and transformation journeys of Insurers?
Insurers are continually at the proverbial edge – they must contend with a barrage of evolving customer expectations (especially in the wake of the unprecedented pandemic), intensified competitive environment replete with additional pressures from the Insurtech firms, and heightened regulations.
In such testing times, it is imperative for the insurers to think ahead of time and brace for an uncertain future. A well- laid out digital transformation and innovation strategy could pretty much allay these concerns and set the stage for a resilient and future-ready organization.
In accomplishing these transformation and innovation priorities, Insurers must aggressively bet their resources on critical success pillars viz. speed (time-to-market), agility, scalability, democratization, intelligence, governance, and efficiency/margin expansion.
Traditional application development approaches are laden with limitations on several fronts and restrict execution of innovation projects at scale and speed. Low-code platforms have been leveraged effectively to deliver quantifiable business outcomes across various business functions of the insurance value chain.
New Product Development
Insurers are swamped with evolving customer requirements for which new products (for emerging customer segments or geographies, or lines of insurance business and so on) have to be launched. A critical success factor during these launches is how quickly can IT enable the provision and sustained delivery of these new products and solutions. Adopting a traditional application development approach defeats the vision of launching a solution into the market with speed.
Underwriting & Policy Administration
To meet dynamic customer expectations and competitive pressures, insurers need to relook at how underwriting and policy management can be executed in the next 10-15 years horizon. Modern, cloud-native systems laced with business process engineering and automation and data-driven approaches will drive greater degrees of efficiency, agility, and compliance for this function.
Marketing & Sales
Marketing and sales (including insurance distribution) remain the cornerstone of the digital transformation projects in insurance companies. This is justifiably so as it directly impacts topline and fuels the business. Low-code has the capability to simplify agent onboarding and training, streamline policy administration for sales professionals and agents, and provide avenues to build intelligent recommendation systems for agents.
Customer Experience & Engagement
Agent – customer engagement is touted to be increasingly digital with a laser sharp focus on emerging modes such as conversational AI platforms. Thrust would be laid on automated and data-driven processes that provide a consolidated view of the customer lifecycle and allow the agents to deliver superior service.
Claims Processing
Digital disruption is anticipated to impact claims processing as well in the future with customer preferences for seamless claims submission, status tracking, and release of claim amounts. Insurers would need to go the “extra” mile to live up to customer expectations in claims processes to develop a competitive moat.
Risk Management & Compliance
With a rise in uncertainty across customer, business, political, technology, and regulatory environments, it becomes imperative for the insurers to adopt a strategic view of the risk management and compliance function to avoid losses and reputation disruption.