Leveraging technology to future-proof insurance

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As a provider of solutions to businesses across the entire insurance value chain, the team at Charles Taylor InsureTech has a bird’s-eye view of the pain points facing the industry – and what can be done to mitigate them

DISCUSSIONS ABOUT the need for insurance services to play catch-up with the innovation occurring in other industry sectors often neglect the fact that the value chain in insurance is, by its nature, quite complex and sophisticated – requiring a considered approach to change. As head of product marketing and pre-sales for Charles Taylor, Joanne Butler sees first-hand the range of challenges affecting insurers, carriers, and reinsurers alike, and how the same themes keep re-emerging. There are three main categories these fall into, she says, and the first is around how to gain a competitive advantage by getting closer to the customer.

Charles Taylor is a leading provider of claims solutions, SaaS technology, and insurance services across the global insurance market, particularly in complex situations requiring specialist expertise. Charles Taylor aims to build long-term, personal relationships with clients based on trust and partnership, spanning multiple value-creating solutions, and to consistently delight with the quality and responsiveness of its people and delivery. Charles Taylor employs over 3,100 staff in more than 120 locations spread across 30 countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. It has earned the trust of a diversified, blue-chip international customer base that includes national and international insurance companies, mutuals, captives, MGAs, Lloyd's syndicates, and reinsurers, along with brokers, distributors, and corporate insureds.

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“Regardless of where they are in the value chain, what everybody wants is to get products to customers more quickly and to launch ‘the next thing’”

Joanne Butler, Charles Taylor InsureTech

“A lot of the people we speak to want to understand their customer better, particularly carriers or insurers because they’re typically using distribution channels to get their products to customers and so are a step removed from them,” she says. “But regardless of where they are in the value chain, what everybody wants is to get products to customers more quickly and to launch ‘the next thing.’” The competitive advantage of being first to market with a new product is significant, Butler says. It enables you to understand the pricing better than anyone else, and to obtain valuable and unique digital data on your customers, their purchasing habits, and where your product is hitting the mark or falling down. This advantage is not underrated by the market, Butler says, but insurance businesses are being dissuaded by the time it can take just to get the right pricing and wording and systems and automation in place. “Then, if it takes six months to get a product on a website, making a change to the pricing or to what it looks like is going to take time as well,” she says. “It’s that kind of market agility that people want, and insurance is always compared to other industries … but it is a sophisticated [product] and, as consumers, we often don’t realise exactly what we’re buying. “That’s the challenge for brokers and insurers – to get us to understand as consumers what we’ve bought. And that’s not straightforward and it’s not necessarily just a tech problem.”

Leveraging internal process efficiency The second key theme Butler is seeing across the industry is around organisations’ internal process efficiency. Given the amount of business activity in insurance, the aftereffects of M&A activity are a crucial challenge, and these transactions often leave businesses with siloed data and systems that don’t work in conjunction with each other. If organisations cannot see all their data across the wider organisation, she says, it can be very hard to know what is working or what needs to change. Legacy systems are another essential element of the process efficiency piece, Butler says. This is particularly true for more mature organisations that may have built some of these

systems themselves and are now finding it more challenging to bring in the highly skilled people necessary to keep them up to date. “With legacy systems, the information flow even within an organisation can be fractured,” she says. “Quite often our customers talk about how they’ve had to rekey things in from one system to another because there’s no way they can connect them. And it goes back to understanding the customer because it means they don’t have a full view of us as customers.” As if building a strong, accurate profile of your customers and automating the data feeds between your systems weren’t enough, the market is also faced with the challenges that come with dealing with other parts of the insurance value chain. Among brokers, insurers, and the insureds, Butler says, every data point can be manual, repetitive, and slow. While humans can be brilliant at crafting and maintaining relationships, when it comes to repeated data management, we’re all far better off letting tech step in.

Technology’s role in problem-solving market challenges What’s interesting to see, she notes, is the role technology has to play in problem-solving with each of the themes currently pressing on the minds and agendas of Charles Taylor InsureTech’s customers and prospects. While technology is only part of the solution, it is a critical part because of its capacity for digital data storage and the 24/7 processing and capturing of data, as well as its role in reducing operational friction. What’s needed by the market, she says, are solutions that blend the individual challenges faced by businesses with the functionality required from the tech – and Charles Taylor InsureTech’s InHub offering looks to do just that.

“That’s the challenge for brokers and insurers – to get us to understand as consumers what we’ve bought. And that’s not straightforward and it’s not necessarily just a tech problem”

Joanne Butler, Charles Taylor InsureTech

“InHub is essentially a one-stop-shop for all the digital capabilities that you might want to have as an insurer or broker to digitise the life cycle,” she says. “It's also an integration framework, which is so important, as a lot of our customers and prospects already have a lot of software, systems, and data. So leveraging that capability is really key, as, often, not being able to connect things is their major challenge.” InHub is designed so customers can use as many or as few of the solutions Charles Taylor InsureTech has to offer as they wish when designing and evolving their bespoke IT landscape. It’s not realistic to expect businesses to slow down or come to a halt simply because they want to update or upgrade their systems, she says, and with InHub’s pick-and mix approach to

digital capabilities, companies can choose the solutions that align with the next steps on their strategic agenda. “There’s still a lot of work to do [in insurance] and, as we say, the biggest room is the room for improvement,” she says. “But we’re seeing more and more transformation officers and chief innovation officers, because these are the kinds of roles required to bring all this together, and that’s change management – it’s operations, it’s understanding IT systems. “We’re seeing more of those roles, which is really helpful because they have an overview of everything that needs to be done but still have a real sense of how the business needs to continue operationally while all this innovation is going on.”

Digital transformation involves a wide range of both consumer- and operations-facing projects

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1. Efficiency 2. Better customer service 3. New products 4. Profitable growth 5. Entering new markets

Key areas of priority for modern businesses

Consumer-facing

Operations-facing

Key projects for (re)insurers

Speed up the claims processes Simplify customer communications via chat bots Outsource certain tasks Simplify the product portfolio Add new ways of customer interaction Record and leverage customer data

Fully move to the cloud Update legacy systems Get value out of their data Review complex IT processes Automate repetitive tasks Review technology suppliers Review / improve ERP and CRM Centralise / standardise across LoBs