CELENT MODEL INSURER ASIA 2017: AWARD CATEGORIES AND NOMINATION STATUS, PART 2

This post is an outline of CELENT MODEL INSURER ASIA 2017. Part 2 explains 2017 nomination status. The trends and features of the projects in this year’s entries are summed up on a category by category basis in this part.

Data Mastery and Analytics

Analytics is a domain that has been given a new birth in the financial services industry recently. The crucial role new sophisticated analytics systems play in today’s insurance comes from different factors that are driving interest:

• New data sources: data insurance companies can leverage has exponentially grown. Data sources are found not only in internal information systems but also in external sources.
• The need to improve technical ratios: the insurance industry needs to find new ways to improve profitability, and in mature markets growing the business has become difficult. Therefore insurance companies understand they need to make investments in core business areas including: underwriting, pricing, claims, etc.
• Emergence of new data analysis techniques: data sciences have made considerable progress over the past decades, and the emergence of new technologies has enabled drastic improvements in data analysis techniques including big data and machine learning.

This category’s entries include the following projects, which are all ambitious and totally worthwhile.

2017 Model Insurer Asia Candidate Projects: Data Mastery and Analytics

Digital and Omnichannel

Digital is a phenomenon affecting every process and operation in insurers as well as the ecosystem of partners and their customers. The increasing abundance of data, the sheer number of gadgets, cameras, and sensors, and the role of advanced analytics is reshaping what is available and reasonable to expect in real time. Insurers want to transform their processes and make them digital to meet the changing expectations of staff, suppliers, and customers. Industries around the globe either leverage digital technologies or find themselves having to respond to digital disruption.

Digital transformation is a vast topic that insurers globally have tried to address for many years. Celent defines digital transformation as the strategy of transferring as many manual tasks as possible into digital activities. This strategy can be achieved in different ways, including:

• Automating processes.
• Selling products online.
• Leveraging mobile devices and mobile technologies in general.
• Dematerializing documents and communication materials.

Digital requires a different way of thinking about business and forces insurers to challenge each manual process and each check and balance. The insurer must test to see if these are truly required, and if so, how they might be digitized. Many insurers have sought to bring straight-through processing to parts of their claim process, to leverage digital channels to capture information, and to update their customer. It takes a different level of commitment to try to drive that thinking all the way through the process.

This category received the highest number of entries this year. Every insurance company in Asia seems to be trying to aggressively adopt digital technology. Moreover, we found many digital transformation examples, which vary depending on the insurance company’s profile, competition, and customer base. Accordingly, we can say that the projects in this category show the most potential. We sorted the entries into five sub categories and have introduced a representative project from each one in the list below.

2017 Model Insurer Asia Candidate Projects: Digital and Omnichannel

Innovation and Emerging Technology

Innovation continued to gain traction. Changing customer expectations, digital transformation, growth needs in the face of resource scarcity, and environmental concerns are impacting every industry, including financial services. These changes accelerate the growth of the sharing economy and the demand for new customer value.

For example, the rise of sensors and intelligent digital ecosystems blur the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds and generate massive new data sources. Next generation analytics and artificial intelligence are coming on stream to harness that data and provide new services to prospects and clients.

Celent’s research on innovation plans in financial services for 2016 (Innovation Outlook 2016) found that the pressure to discover new sources of value for customers will continue. In 2017, implementing known solutions in these areas to gain parity with competitors will continue to be a priority.

In Innovation and Emerging Technologies, we can see the history of each company’s projects and their future strategy. Innovations are becoming more and more important, particularly from strategic perspective, as is obvious from the projects in this year’s entries. On the other hand, innovations should not be transient events but persistent changes in a set routine, which will lead to improvements in corporate quality. We have introduced two of the projects below that prove how important and effective innovations are for companies to grow.

2017 Model Insurer Asia Candidate Projects: Innovation and Emerging Technology

--- This event celebrates the success of the Model Insurer Asia winners. In addition, we will preview the Model Insurer Asia Report.

Celent Innovation & Insight Day Asia featuring Model Insurer Asia Awards

To be continued – Click here