This submit is a part of a collection sponsored by AgentSync.
At this time’s insurance coverage businesses depend on a mean of 5.7 to 11.9 totally different expertise platforms for day-to-day operations, relying on their whole income. For big-scale carriers managing a number of businesses and their downstream producers, it’s seemingly that quantity is even larger. Whereas this stage of digital innovation represents a constructive change within the insurance coverage trade’s potential to supply trendy experiences to its customers and environment friendly workflows to its staff, cultivating a extra strong tech stack doesn’t come with out challenges.
Every time an insurance coverage group invests in a brand new digital answer, it’s creating better efficiencies for at the very least one piece of the insurance coverage distribution puzzle. When a enterprise begins out, it might solely have the assets to buy essentially the most important expertise, like an e-mail software and a bookkeeping software program. Because the enterprise grows, it invests in additional expertise to assist handle the rise in purchasers and staff — an HR system, a buyer relationship administration (CRM) system, a compliance administration answer, and so forth.
Whereas these techniques little doubt create better efficiencies for the enterprise, there’s no denying the irony that the extra complicated your tech stack will get, the extra inefficient it might turn out to be. In actual fact, it’s not unusual that, as carriers and businesses buy extra techniques, they uncover some massive issues.
How does a fancy tech stack affect your insurance coverage enterprise?
Poor integration capabilities result in fragmented techniques
The extra techniques you add to your tech stack, the extra necessary it’s for these applied sciences to speak with each other. However with as a lot as 74 % of insurance coverage firms nonetheless counting on legacy expertise for his or her core enterprise capabilities, seamlessly linking present techniques to new ones in order that they perform collectively in a significant means isn’t precisely the norm. Older techniques use totally different knowledge codecs, protocols, and constructions than trendy options. These variations may cause vital compatibility points that make integrations extra complicated and in the end result in system fragmentation.
Silos restrict sensible, data-driven enterprise selections
Your distribution channel is stuffed with knowledge on each downstream associate you’re employed with. Proactive insurance coverage organizations use this knowledge to intelligently increase, contract, and restructure their distribution channels in response to shifting market alternatives and challenges. Because of this, data-driven companies are 23 occasions extra more likely to purchase new clients and 19 occasions extra more likely to obtain above-average profitability than their much less data-driven counterparts. Nonetheless, knowledge silos, a standard symptom of lackluster integrations between a number of techniques, make it tough to leverage producer knowledge for knowledgeable selections. Silos stop producer knowledge from flowing seamlessly by way of your techniques, creating a number of variations of reality in your information and making it tough to decipher the place essentially the most correct info really lives.
Scalability points stop worthwhile development
With regards to sustainable development, automated options have been an actual game-changer for the insurance coverage trade. For instance, lately, with the best distribution channel administration answer, any service onboarding an company and its a number of downstream producers can validate a number of licenses throughout a number of strains of authority and a number of states all on the click on of a button. Not all that way back, the identical course of was solely achievable by way of hours, if not days, of guide work. Nonetheless, not all automations are created equally and plenty of legacy applied sciences lack the power to scale effectively, making it simply as tough to develop with out additionally rising overhead prices.
Disjointed techniques improve safety and compliance dangers
Complicated and ever-changing regulatory necessities kind the spine of the insurance coverage trade (critically, we’ve an entire collection about it), making compliance more and more complicated to keep up. Staying on high of rules and avoiding penalties is especially difficult whenever you’re coping with disjointed techniques which might be unable to replace in real-time, creating inconsistencies in your distribution community knowledge. On high of compliance danger, knowledge safety is a serious concern for companies with a fancy tech infrastructure. In a research inspecting the state of cybersecurity throughout the insurance coverage sector, SecurityScorecard discovered that third-party software program and IT vulnerabilities had been accountable for half of the info breaches reported by 150 high insurance coverage companies.
Price range predictions reveal a better concentrate on decreasing IT complexity
Between the pitfalls of a fancy tech stack and the continued market volatility and consequent finances tightening of the previous few years, it might come as a suprise that consultants predict an improve in tech spend throughout the insurance coverage trade over the subsequent 12 months. However, digging slightly deeper into the place and the way companies plan to make use of these funds paints a clearer image.
With talks of tech consolidation from big-name gamers like GEICO, and better stress on IT departments to ship quicker ROI, it’s seemingly we’ll see much less prioritization on multi-year, complicated technological overhauls and better funding in lower-lift, modular options to assist consolidate fragmented infrastructure, scale back vendor administration complexities, simplify workflows, and unlock deeper knowledge analytic capabilities.
The main focus shift makes much more sense when you think about the truth that many insurance coverage carriers and businesses have already invested a long time of time and hundreds of thousands of {dollars} into their present techniques. With regards to their IT, these of us aren’t seeking to reinvent the wheel a lot as they’re in search of complement options that can increase their effectivity with as little enterprise interruption as attainable.
The answer: Investing in APIs to scale back tech complexity and increase operational effectivity
For companies with present distribution channel administration ecosystems, software programming interfaces (APIs) provide an answer for enhancing operational effectivity with out ripping and changing present techniques. Modernizing giant and complicated techniques, like these used to handle your insurance coverage distribution channels, can take months or years. APIs scale back tech complexity and get essentially the most full and up-to-date producer knowledge flowing by way of your techniques extra rapidly and effectively than ever earlier than. Carriers and businesses that put money into APIs profit from their:
Improved integration capabilities: APIs combine immediately into a corporation’s present platforms, opening the door for extra seamless knowledge trade between disparate techniques and eliminating bottlenecks in day by day workflows.
Seamless, safe scalability: By leveraging APIs that derive knowledge from trade sources of reality, companies can focus much less of their time and assets on knowledge upkeep as their enterprise grows, and extra on taking advantage of the tech infrastructure that drives their core enterprise processes.
Actual-time knowledge: APIs can elevate distribution community knowledge high quality by synchronizing a corporation’s present tech (and the info that lives inside it) with trade sources of reality. Fairly than counting on guide knowledge validation, APIs mechanically guarantee producer knowledge is at all times up-to-date and helpful.
By leveraging APIs, insurance coverage carriers and businesses can rework their tech infrastructure from complicated, fragmented, and inefficent to agile, linked, and trendy. Because of this, they’ll keep away from spending the money and time wanted to finish a complete system overhaul and achieve better visibility into their distribution channel knowledge throughout their present platforms.
Let AgentSync’s ProducerSync API meet you the place you’re at
If tech complexity is obstructing key distribution channel knowledge from flowing by way of your present techniques, then your knowledge’s not doing you a lot good. From surfacing key producer knowledge when and the place you want it (suppose earlier than binding a coverage or paying out a fee), to extremely refined analyses on the right way to optimize your distribution channel for max success, ProducerSync API will be the tech enhancement your small business wants on the value and implementation timeline it desires.
Contact considered one of our consultants in the present day to learn the way your group may gain advantage from ProducerSync API.
Subjects
InsurTech
Tech
