Life and Health Newsletter

Time to Start Again

Our periodic discussions with insurers demonstrate that most of them have plenty of new activities on their agenda. Life insurers are looking at new opportunities to expand their business, and launching a greenfield business is often seen as an interesting alternative. As emphasized by our Oliver Wyman colleagues in their report and webinar titled The State of Financial Services 2019: Time to Start Againgreenfield business requires specific attributes including state-of-the-art technology.

In our discussions with life insurers, we observe a growing appetite for APIs, microservices, and cloud-native platforms. These applications support insurers’ requirements in terms of cost and efficiency as well as speed to market and providing a robust digital experience to customers. For more on this topic, we recommend our report defining trade-offs between features and technology when considering such systems: Searching for API, Microservices, and Cloud-Native Insurance Software: Finding the Optimal Trade-Off.

Beyond core systems, life insurers also need to continuously challenge their business model. While looking for greenfield opportunities is a way of questioning the relevance of their traditional value chain, we think there are potential disruptions down the road. Indeed, we expect some drivers of change will have an impact on the traditional value chain, and data will be the next battlefield for life insurers, as described in a recent report titled Disaggregation of the Traditional Insurance Value Chain: Life Edition.

We remain focused on what life insurers tell us, having just closed our review of their IT and business priorities in North America and Europe. For more, we recommend reading our reports providing the results of our annual insurance CIO surveys:

• Life Insurance CIO Pressures and Priorities 2019: North American Edition
• Insurance in Europe: 2019 Business and IT Priorities

The review of CIOs priorities in LATAM and APAC will be the subject of reports to be published later this year.

The Asia Insurance Technology Awards (AITAs) will be hosted in Thailand on June 26-27. The award recognizes excellence and innovation in the use of technology within the insurance industry in the Asia Pacific Region. Nomination are now being accepted. The deadline for nominations is 17 May.

Finally, we are delighted to announce the winners of the 2019 Model Insurer Awards. The program in 2019 was again incredibly competitive. Nearly 60 insurers of all sizes from 21 countries submitted over 90 nominations. Such a high number of submissions of extraordinary quality across the board is a testament to the hard work going on in the industry, as companies continue to transform and innovate.

Sincerely,

Nicolas Michellod
Head of Insurance, APAC and EMEA