Driving change within the insurance industry
Insurance companies are facing many challenges that are putting immense pressure on the business. Amongst these is operating in a demanding and complex economic and regulatory environment, whereby there are growing capital needs and very low interest rates. The sheer number and complexity of their legacy systems also impact on the time and costs of launching a new insurance product. It can take approximately 9 months for a new product to reach the market, which impacts on their ability to respond to new customer segments as well as expectations.
An insurtech solution
With a focus on helping insurers face the challenges of digital transformation regarding product development, the EU-funded InsurAgility project set out to create a cloud-enabled insurance product configurator that can work autonomously as well as integrate with core policy management systems. It further aimed to provide customers with the ability to design and use their own customer journey processes in terms of both product design and product quotation. “In other words, we proposed to deploy a web-enabled insurance products configurator and publisher,” explains Nuno Ferreira, project coordinator. The web application allows insurers to create, using a custom insurance domain-specific language, all the components that are required to deploy a web service and a user interface with the necessary information for quoting a product. The latter provides information about coverages, plans, formulas, parameters and insurance concepts. A closer look as to how it works reveals the InsurAgility solution uses an AI-powered process to extract information from documents, for example, in xls, docs, pdf and csv formats, and loads them into the InsurAgility platform. Using that information, business users, with minimum to no dependency on IT, can create insurance concepts and their validator values, such as, tables, formulas, questionnaires, forms, procedures, plans, coverages and processes, and then bundle them all in one insurance product. “They are then able to test that insurance product and, once it passes, deploy the product, that is a web service and a user interface, to a place of the customer’s choice,” outlines Ferreira. It can be deployed, for instance, to a test site, an insurance core system and a partner portal. Right after deployment, end users can quote those products and start the underwriting process for them.
A new way of operating
The InsurAgility solution is set to revolutionise how insurance companies face digital transformation by providing a disruptive answer to the modernisation of insurance IT systems. It will reduce the burden of existing legacy systems in insurance companies as well as help to empower customers as they will be able to create new insurance products faster, cheaper and easier. Therefore, the obstacles to creating customer-specific, segmented insurance products will become lower. During the project, the core architecture and components of the new cloud-native solution, the editors, and the mechanism enabling integration between the InsurAgility solution and existing core systems were achieved. “We also launched the InsurAgility platform, a major milestone of the project, and we further developed our product offer while evolving our technological stack,” notes Ferreira. Discussing what may come next, Ferreira concludes: “The focus is on dissemination and to make demos for the major leads that the project currently has.” This is in addition to delivering new features for the product. “The product is also making its way to presales and marketing channels.”
Keywords
InsurAgility, insurance, insurance companies, insurance products, digital transformation, web service, user interface
