How Have COVID-19, Digital, and the Global Economy Impacted Life Insurance Outsourcing?

COVID-19 presented the global life insurance industry with challenges that have turned into opportunities. New societal realities and customer needs mean insurance companies must now transform themselves to become more digital and agile. The insurer’s core value proposition, distribution approach, workforce strategies, and data and technology environments must all be in sync as they transform. For many, this transformation can’t be accomplished completely on their own. Insurance business process outsourcing (BPO) or third party administration (TPA) may offer them the ability to meet their transformation goals.

Most life insurers continue to struggle with a legacy technology environment. The pandemic magnified these struggles. So naturally they began looking for new operating models, which in turn had them working with service partners to help them be more digital and agile. Service providers in the BPO/TPA services market have been building out their own automated solutions to improve operations, often with their own business process as a service (BPaaS) technology and sometimes with a third party’s solution. It only makes sense that outsourcing vendors could bring some of their best practices and processes to their life insurance clients to help them overcome their challenges.

This report is designed to provide some context for discussion of the global life insurance business process outsourcing (BPO) market by analyzing the current uses of BPO for core insurance services based on input from the companies providing services. To gauge the state of insurance BPO across the globe, Celent invited 270 firms—all of which offer BPO and other services to insurers—to participate in a survey. Data was received on 643 deals from 16 vendors across life and P&C insurance. This report will concentrate on the life insurance deals.