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Financial Services Review | Thursday, April 13, 2023
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The insurance industry is evolving rapidly, and technology is playing a crucial role in driving this change. Insurance companies are adopting new technologies and digital tools to improve efficiency, enhance customer experience, and streamline operations.
FREMONT, CA: The management teams of established insurance companies are under increasing pressure to undergo a digital transformation to remain competitive as the world becomes more digital and networked. In the next ten years, emerging digital technologies will have such an impact on the insurance that fully tech-enabled insurance businesses would not look alike.
Companies in the insurance industry must keep a close eye on new technological trends that have the potential to upend the whole insurance industry to maintain their competitive edge. As technology develops, it creates new possibilities for enhancing operational effectiveness, raising cost savings, and providing more individualised experiences. Though implementing cutting-edge technologies and creating digital channels appear inevitable, the issue of where to concentrate still exists. Because of how quickly technology is developing, insurers' ability to accurately analyse, evaluate, embrace, and deploy the appropriate technologies has become a crucial competence.
The insurance industry is more complicated than ever because of the rising volumes of client data. Sincedecision-makers seldom have rapid access to reliable data, the typical method used by insurance companies to collect dispersed data across segmented business units considerably slows down business operations. Furthermore, managing enormous amounts of unstructured data through manual methods makes analysis costly, time-consuming, and error-prone. Additionally, an information gap may result in insurers' non-compliance difficulties and expensive fines.
Insurance is a data-intensive industry that is well-positioned to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve speed, efficiency, and accuracy, get market and consumer insights, and lower risk. Across the entire value chain, from back-office operations to the front, AI applications are possible.
Manual procedures must be replaced due to the dynamic changes in the insurance market and the rate of business expansion. Insurance companies are integrating AI capabilities across their entire value chain to embrace robotic process automation and offer better interactions for customers, partners, and employees. They will be able to deal with uncertainties and effectively compete with threats from insurtech startups and other new market entrants by integrating AI-based tools and solutions into their operations.
One of the most revolutionary technologies that have changed how modern businesses operate is the cloud. Although this technology has been around for more than ten years, financial services businesses were originally slow to implement it. But over time, insurers have increased their use of cloud computing due to the clear advantages of increasing productivity, focusing on customers, and becoming a data-driven business. Cloud computing is now a crucial component of insurance carriers' IT strategies as they widely adopt digital tools and solutions.
However, it is anticipated that the trend toward cloud use will see a major uptick in 2023. In addition to the usual advantages of cloud computing, such as lower operating costs, easier solution architectures, faster processing, and (nearly) infinite scalability, new technologies present another compelling argument for moving data to the cloud. Efficient management and usage of extremely large data sets become important with the development in the relevance of new technologies for the insurance sector, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, smart data analytics, telematics, IoT, and others. This calls for enormous computational capacity, which only the cloud can deliver.
Additionally, an agile, adaptable, and scalable digital infrastructure is required due to the emergence of new business models in the insurance sector and quicker product innovation cycles. Finding and collaborating with the ideal cloud providers becomes crucial since cloud computing continues to be the primary engine and enabler of digitisation and innovation.
The Internet of Things (IoT), a technology that links the real and digital worlds, is a quickly spreading trend that will alter the insurance sector in the upcoming years. With IoT devices, insurance firms can get access to more data from a variety of sources over the Internet, which helps them analyse risks and model pricing more effectively. Real-time data interchange is made possible by the extensive network of sensors and linked devices that are exchanged via the ultra-fast 5G infrastructure and are evaluated and processed utilising distributed edge architecture.
Insurers can have a better understanding of the actual risks related to particular consumers as a result of the increased frequency and volume of data being collected on customer behaviour, risk profiles, and usage patterns. Insurers can create plans that are tailored to these customers' needs using these findings and cutting-edge analytical tools.
The acquired data can be used by the insurers to identify and stop fraud, receive notice of problems as they happen, accelerate the processing of claims, lower actual risk, and lessen losses. The usage-based insurance system that enables insurers to determine and adjust policyholders' premiums based on real-time data makes telematics a fantastic potential for them to improve customer experience and streamline business processes. Insurance companies have yet to use IoT, despite early implementation attempts occurring a few years ago. IoT solutions are expected to be widely adopted starting in 2023, though.