The Great Reset

It had been more than two years since I attended a conference. My first was this week in Tampa, FL at the 2022 Life Insurance Conference. Not as large as past LOMA/LIMRA conferences pre-Covid, this one provided the ability to get to know the attendees and the vendors in the exhibit hall. It also provided me with an opportunity to sit in on several sessions. The sessions crossed many topics including insurtechs, underwriting, distribution, diversity/inclusion, data & analytics, and more. The conference was aptly named "The Great Reset" because the North American life insurance industy had to completely reset the way they did business as a result of Covid. The ability to meet face to face to sell the product was disrupted, work from home happened nearly overnight, and to support it legacy technology had to act more like SaaS technology. This provided the opportunitiy for many new ideas and innovations to take hold like the need for more online or Zoom sales and instant underwriting with data instead of labs and in person sales by agents.

I personally moderated a panel discussion at the end of the third day. The topic was Getting Value from Data with panelist Anna Williams - VP SwiftTerm, Symetra; Kartik Sakthivel - CIO, LIMRA and LOMA; and Chris Moroz - VP, Data Management Solutions, Equisoft/UCT. In the session we talked about how life insurers are using and getting value from data, which technologies they are implementing, and the challenges they are encountering while trying to implement data strategies. Using Celent research from May 2021, I presented survey results on what the market was doing. Anna gave the insurer perspective, agreeing that what Celent found in the data was along the lines of what Symetra was experiencing. Most insurers are getting value out of the data in the areas of pricing and risk evaluation. Automated underwriting was a big topic at the conference and SwiftTerm is a great example of effectively allowing consumers to apply online and using data to quickly underwrite applicants. Better understanding the customer and creating a 360 view of that customer and their needs was also discussed by Kartik and Chris, as they see customer centricity being pursued by the insurers with whom they work.

Life insurance is an industry awash with data. It comes from extensive digital transformations, integrations, and interfaces with various data sources, point solutions, and innovations (often insurtechs). Turning these new assets into more valuable assets is key to sustainable competitiveness where price, ease of doing business, and peace of mind matter. The challenge is finding a way to use to get this value. Beyond just knowing what data to use, most insurers are challenged by overcoming cultural change ("we've never looked at things that way!" or "we've never considered using data that way!"), finding the right staff to analyze and use the results of that data effectively, and getting data out of legacy systems that were never meant to provide real time data feeds. Insurers are indeed finding ways to overcome these challenges. Technologically, the challenges are being solved with configurable systems, data migrations and integrations, accessible application programming interfaces, and emerging data and decision as a service solutions. The fact that many organizations now have Chief Data Officers and Chief Chief Analytic Officers means that they are taking the need to understand and get value from data seriously. Talent issues are helped by the flexibility given to staff to work from anywhere. The need for action was evident in my panel discussion and in the sessions that I attended.

My session as well as the other I attended led to an active Q&A session. It was great to see such audience participation and interaction. While this was my first conference post-Covid, it certainly won't be my last. I look forward to the conferences getting bigger and 'back to normal.'

Send me a message if you want to discuss anything further.