Nowadays, every insurance CIO needs a strategy for digital distribution and policy administration. Unfortunately, many companies are still relying on monolithic enterprise systems that can’t keep up with changes in business requirements and customer expectations.
Why the Old Enterprise Approach Doesn’t Work Anymore
Enterprise systems were generally designed for companies’ internal users: underwriters and other B2B folks who are paid to use that system. But these monolithic platforms are often too slow to meet the expectations of consumers and digital distribution partners who have a choice in the matter.
Online giants such as Amazon, Netflix, and Airbnb have completely reshaped the consumer mindset and raised the bar for all types of online transactions. Carriers offering a faster, more flexible approach to digital policy sales and administration will end up benefitting from today’s big growth opportunities.
Think about all of the sales channels, brokers and aggregators in the market who want to have their own online presence—but expect you to have the back end covered. Your channel partners want customers to stay in their user experience while you provide the rating and policy administration services.
Success means having a platform that your customers and partners can seamlessly tap into to generate quotes and certificates of insurance, and complete other tasks throughout the policy lifecycle. For many carriers, this situation demands a new approach on the technology side.
Designing new systems internally leaves the development process isolated from the broader marketplace of technical ideas and assets. It’s hard to know you’re on the right track, plus there are limits on resources as new projects must compete with existing initiatives, and internal development requires a much longer-term commitment of research, development, and maintenance.
Faced with these challenges, insurance CIOs are naturally looking to the technology marketplace for solutions. There’s been a flood of activity in the InsurTech sector, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for carriers to find value. In addition to countless tech companies backed by private equity and venture capital, you also have companies just throwing buzzwords like “blockchain” into their name, strictly for PR spin.
Even among the serious entrants, there is often a lack of insurance-specific expertise. Many InsurTech companies are coming out of pure IT or financial backgrounds. This means their “solutions” may not be designed for the specific challenges you face in delivering new policy lifecycle functionality.
Between the challenges of internal development and the hype in the marketplace, finding the right technology solution to support your digital strategies is difficult even for veteran CIOs. Let’s look at a few things that could indicate your current strategy needs re-thinking:
- Cost overruns
- Blown timelines for rolling out features and products
- Unable to support new business initiatives (new insurance products, new distribution channels)
- Surprises and unexpected challenges handling new requirements, updates to existing products, technology upgrades, and web browser versions
If you’re experiencing these types of events, it may be a sign that you need a new approach to achieving your digital goals. Of course, going to the board and saying “we need to write off the cost of that enterprise system and start from scratch” is a non-starter. It’s critical for insurance CIOs to maximize or optimize utilization of the systems they already have in place. This is why microservices architecture represents one of the best paths for InsurTech development.
How to Become More Agile With Insurance Microservices
Solartis has created a new approach to rapidly enable digital insurance products. You choose what you need from our full suite of insurance microservices:
- Just need a rating engine that automatically consumes the latest ISO ERC updates? We’ve got that.
- Want to design your own user interface on top of a pre-built policy administration system? We make it easy for you!
- Need the works? We’ve got you covered with an end-to-end solution for every step of the policy lifecycle from rating to renewal, including the UI.
- Equally importantly, with Solartis Insure you only pay for what you actually use, based on metrics like total premium or transactions, so your technology can easily scale with your business.
At Solartis, our goal is to simplify insurance administration one microservice at a time. Contact us today or explore our website to find out how we can help enable your digital strategy.
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