Digital Acceleration is the new catch phrase of the times. Along with all other industries around the world 2020 has seen the insurance industry adjust priorities to what has become the new baseline, a digital world that is driven by technology. Prior to the pandemic the acceleration of innovation had permanently affected the way that consumers and companies interact, but it took years — just think about how the iPhone and Amazon have transformed our behaviours and expectations over the last decade. Now COVID-19 has amplified the digital need 10-fold in a dramatically brief period of time. Continual innovation in advanced and emerging technologies will be the catalyst for the acceleration of digital transformation in today’s highly virtualized environment.
The new virtualized world has forced a new operating model on insurers that will require the use of advanced technologies to support new product, virtual agent, csr and customer experience strategies. For all insurers, Life insurers especially, implementing or extending innovative technology based solutions is imperative, the world has been virtualized almost overnight and many traditional Life insurer products and technology ecosystems are not architected for what is now a digital D2C world. After a brief pause in Q2 to assess and recalibrate we see many insurers and solution providers taking the digital challenge head on. They have adjusted investment focus to accelerate the way they do business digitally. These investments are being made in a wide range of newer technologies — to drive the customer experience, improve decisions, or create processing efficiencies. To do this they are leveraging a range of tools, from consumer-facing solutions like collaboration and video, to artificial intelligence, machine learning, chatbots, and other cross-industry types of enablers.
The silver lining in 2020 is an acceleration of investment in technology to support the rapidly evolving digital world. The result? One can only imagine but we may just see the greatest advancement in insurance technology solutions in the shortest period of time ever. If you have been involved with life insurance technology as long as I have, that’s saying something!