InsureTech Connect 2019, held in Las Vegas, brought insurance leaders and innovators together to discuss the latest trends of digital transformation in insurance. Attendees and presenters alike shared the excitement for the future of insurance technologies as they discussed AI, smart data, cloud, connected car & home, drones, and other innovative platforms & tools. These technologies are playing a crucial role in reshaping the insurance industry and enabling insurers to add agility to their business and provide personalized experiences to customers, agents, and partners.
Digital Transformation in Action
ValueMomentum hosted a lunch workshop—Insurance Digital Transformation in Action—at InsureTech Connect ‘19. As part of the workshop, we invited Novarica – an analyst firm to share digital transformation trends, and our client, Erie Insurance to share tips and advice on their successful digital journey. The workshop was moderated by ValueMomentum’s VP and Client Partner, Siva Pillai.
In the workshop, Martina Conlon, EVP Research & Consulting at Novarica, emphasized the ever-increasing need to leverage technology to bring innovation in insurance products/services and deliver value to customers. She shed light on how insurers are focusing on digital transformation to streamline processes and improve user experience.
Martina stated that insurers’ investments are focused on enhancing their digital and data capabilities. While digital is more emphasized than data across all functional areas, data takes the lead in customer engagement. She also advised insurers to be clear about the value they are trying to achieve through innovation in order to leverage technology successfully and capture evolving market opportunities.
Next in the line after Martina, Ruben Fechner, SVP Applications & Support, and Tim Shine, VP, Commercial Lines Technology of Erie Insurance shared their organization’s approach to digital. Erie digital transformation includes projects to improve distribution, service, product mix, and user experience. To achieve this, the company devised a phase-wise approach that includes: (1) Modernizing their platforms, (2) Streamlining their processes such as policy issuance, endorsement, and renewal and enhancing product offerings, and (3) Enabling data-driven decision making and providing a customer-centric view. With this approach, the incremental value derived at each phase has taken the company a step closer to accomplishing their digital transformation goals.
Tim spoke about one of the projects from their digital journey – digitizing the sales, quote, and bind process for agents. As part of the project, Erie leveraged ValueMomentum’s technology services to develop a solution that helped them achieve a 50% reduction in time to market and time savings by 98.61% in quote/bind processes on an average. This solution was well-received by their agency force and won them awards in the analyst and partner communities.
With the success of this project that was implemented for commercial lines, Erie plans to apply the same to Claims, Life, and Personal lines of their business.
Key Components of Digital Transformation
Novarica’s research and Erie’s successful digital transformation journey emphasize why insurers should focus on instituting digital platforms to enable their digital strategies for improving core, data, customer experience, and/or other capabilities.
Although it may vary from one insurer to the other, four essential components of a digital journey are:
- Simplifying and automating core capabilities
- Leveraging data for operations and analytics
- Establishing a digital platform
- Developing key features such as reusability of services, API-based architecture, rapid application development tools/platform, and adoption or integration of a Cloud-based PaaS technology
ValueMomentum has helped many insurers in their digital transformation journeys across all the four essential components. Take a look at our digital offerings to learn about how we can help you develop innovative platforms and leverage technologies to bring success to your digital transformation.