Periodic Reporting for period 2 - InsurAgility (MAKING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION A REALITY FOR INSURERS)
Berichtszeitraum: 2019-10-01 bis 2020-09-30
InsurAgility is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud-native application aiming to manage the insurance product development processes, portfolio, compliance, and governance. With its solution, InsurAgility aims to meet today’s insurance companies’ problems:
• Insurance is a key part of any economy and it is a complex business, requiring sophisticated management of risk and of distribution and service networks.
• Insurance companies are facing unprecedented regulation and disclosure responsibilities, which have increased the effort and cost of compliance, also increasing the risk of non-compliance through heavy fines.
• A low interest rate environment limits investment while at the same time, new business opportunities demand it.
• Many insurers are held back by a business and technical legacy which they can’t live without, is hard to change and was definitely not designed for the digital age of mass segmentation.
• The market is changing at great speed, fragmenting customers and new distribution method, there is a lot of pressure and desire to address these challenges with new methods.
• It is many times not viable to change entire systems, that represent years of investment, to meet this challenge and this frustrates many insurers.
• The time and cost of launching a new insurance product is too high, endangering segmentation and proper placement of insurance products.
The challenge today is complex and requires a broader solution that can handle existing accumulated problems. These problems lead to loss of profits (for companies due to loss of opportunities), lack of insurance (for citizens not being insured for a given context), and an overall brake on innovation and citizen security. Insurance in one of innovation cornerstones and giving to consumers the right insurance on the right time provides safety and fosters investment and innovation.
InsurAgility comes with a two-folded solution to these problems: with a unique solution focused on an insurance product development process management and governance and also with a process that enables insurers to meet their customers’ expectations regarding time to market and compliance.
• Insurance is a key part of any economy and it is a complex business, requiring sophisticated management of risk and of distribution and service networks.
• Insurance companies are facing unprecedented regulation and disclosure responsibilities, which have increased the effort and cost of compliance, also increasing the risk of non-compliance through heavy fines.
• A low interest rate environment limits investment while at the same time, new business opportunities demand it.
• Many insurers are held back by a business and technical legacy which they can’t live without, is hard to change and was definitely not designed for the digital age of mass segmentation.
• The market is changing at great speed, fragmenting customers and new distribution method, there is a lot of pressure and desire to address these challenges with new methods.
• It is many times not viable to change entire systems, that represent years of investment, to meet this challenge and this frustrates many insurers.
• The time and cost of launching a new insurance product is too high, endangering segmentation and proper placement of insurance products.
The challenge today is complex and requires a broader solution that can handle existing accumulated problems. These problems lead to loss of profits (for companies due to loss of opportunities), lack of insurance (for citizens not being insured for a given context), and an overall brake on innovation and citizen security. Insurance in one of innovation cornerstones and giving to consumers the right insurance on the right time provides safety and fosters investment and innovation.
InsurAgility comes with a two-folded solution to these problems: with a unique solution focused on an insurance product development process management and governance and also with a process that enables insurers to meet their customers’ expectations regarding time to market and compliance.
The InsurAgility project is a brand-new cloud-native solution for insurance companies that aims to solve some of the problem’s insurers face related to the insurance product development process.
The main effort made during the first reporting period relates to the definition, analysis, design and implementation of the system architecture. Since this architecture relies on a microservices base deployed in Kubernetes it brings many engineering challenges that needed to be overcome. Also, the insurance domain is complex and modelling its artifacts considering multiple business lines in order to be supported by a software tool is a complex task. The domain model had to be created in such a way that allowed the creation of P&C, Health, Life, and other lines of business according to the insurer’s specification and requirements. Each insurer has its own very specific reality that need to be modelled.
Value for insurers increases when they are able to integrate cloud-native tools with their existing systems in a seamless way and with minimum to none IT intervention.
The work performed and the main results achieved are the core architecture and core components of the new cloud-native solution, the editors that support the creation of business-added value to insurers (definition and stand-alone execution of business functions, formulas, questionnaires, simulations, glossaries, catalogs, and insurance products) and the mechanism that enable integration between InsurAgility and existing core systems.
The main effort made during the first reporting period relates to the definition, analysis, design and implementation of the system architecture. Since this architecture relies on a microservices base deployed in Kubernetes it brings many engineering challenges that needed to be overcome. Also, the insurance domain is complex and modelling its artifacts considering multiple business lines in order to be supported by a software tool is a complex task. The domain model had to be created in such a way that allowed the creation of P&C, Health, Life, and other lines of business according to the insurer’s specification and requirements. Each insurer has its own very specific reality that need to be modelled.
Value for insurers increases when they are able to integrate cloud-native tools with their existing systems in a seamless way and with minimum to none IT intervention.
The work performed and the main results achieved are the core architecture and core components of the new cloud-native solution, the editors that support the creation of business-added value to insurers (definition and stand-alone execution of business functions, formulas, questionnaires, simulations, glossaries, catalogs, and insurance products) and the mechanism that enable integration between InsurAgility and existing core systems.
InsurAgility will impact the insurance market and, as consequence, citizens, in the bellow fields:
• Customer empowerment: since InsurAgility enable insurers to create new insurance products faster, cheaper, and easier, the barriers to create customer-specific, segmented insurance products, will become lower. This contributes for the empowerment of customers and to reducing barriers of segmentation in niche markets or persons.
• Gradual modernization of insurance systems, since the new InsurAgility offering will be cloud-native, this reduces management burden of existing legacy systems in insurance companies and allows insurers to focus on modernizing their existing systems.
By the end of the development it is expected to deliver a cloud-native solution, easily adopted by any insurance or reinsurance company and that can help them with their insurance product development, management and governance. It is InsurAgility objective to enable insurers to launch new digital insurance products from idea to quote in days, not months, while managing compliance and governance.
• Customer empowerment: since InsurAgility enable insurers to create new insurance products faster, cheaper, and easier, the barriers to create customer-specific, segmented insurance products, will become lower. This contributes for the empowerment of customers and to reducing barriers of segmentation in niche markets or persons.
• Gradual modernization of insurance systems, since the new InsurAgility offering will be cloud-native, this reduces management burden of existing legacy systems in insurance companies and allows insurers to focus on modernizing their existing systems.
By the end of the development it is expected to deliver a cloud-native solution, easily adopted by any insurance or reinsurance company and that can help them with their insurance product development, management and governance. It is InsurAgility objective to enable insurers to launch new digital insurance products from idea to quote in days, not months, while managing compliance and governance.