Technology Investment Trends for Asia insurers

At the first half of 2010, Celent interviewed selected Asian CIOs. The interviews covered business and IT priorities for 2010, as well as details around changes to budgets, spending priorities, and attitudes towards outsourcing and new technologies. Asia is a diverse market. Some trends in one market may not apply to another market. However, there are a number of common trends in technology investment: ---Increase investment in process automation to improve operational efficiency; Many Asia insurers employ a large team of back office staff because these Asia insurers at present have a low automation level, they still use quite a lot manual method when process business. CIOs understand that they must gradually automate many process, to achieve operational efficiency, as well as reduce cost. The IT initiatives we see in Asia insurers’ projects plan that supporting automation are further investment in enterprise technologies such as BPM (Business Process Management), BRM (Business Rules Management), and document management. ---Centralize IT operation; Over 85% of the Asia CIO survey participants said they have their IT operation centralized, for global players, some are centralized in whole Asia with minimal on-country IT, some are centralized at country level. ---IT outsourcing is increasing in general. Over 45% of the Asia CIO survey participants said that they will keep their IT outsourcing in 2010 as the same of 2009, around 40% of insurers will increase their outsourcing. ---Asian insurers are technology aware; In regard to IT architecture strategy, insurers plan to develop a SOA enterprise wide or De-couple front and back office with a middleware layer, very few will maintain existing architecture; Asian insurers are not yet actively using emerging technologies but are in consideration for using selected emerging technologies in non-critical business. Celent's new report "Asia Insurance—the year ahead: The CIO Perspective" will be published soon, and will discuss on business themes such as growing the business, cost reduction, ease of doing business, meeting regulation requirements, time to market, and their related IT initiatives in detail; will discuss IT budget, areas of increased investment, IT initiatives arround Underwriting /Policy Admin, distribution and claims; In regard to Enterprise IT strategy, the report discussed IT structure, Architecture Strategy, IT Outsourcing, and Emerging Technology such as AJAX, social networking, cloud computing, SaaS.