I recently attended my first DXC Insurance Conference, which was held in Miami. As a cornerstone of the conference, the DXC team introduced their vision for their new digital platform, Digital Assure; they also held various group sessions on P/C and life insurance business and technology topics throughout the week. DXC’s digital platform solution appears to be in line with other P/C digital platform providers that have rolled out similar cloud-based digital platform solutions in the past year or so—Majesco’s Digital1st, Sapiens’s DigitalHub, and Insurity’s Digital Services—all providing an orchestration layer for integrations, partner ecosystems, and toolkits to build out modern UIs and other experiences.
Insurance digital platforms can be valuable, cloud-based “platform-as-a-service” solutions for insurers who seek to leverage these cloud providers for the heavy lifting of staffing, security, and support. More importantly, digital platforms can be of great value to insurers with a digital strategy that incorporates modern technologies to improve engagement, integration, and experience. Engagement from agents, brokers, and insureds is a valuable way insurers can distinguish themselves from competitors. This engagement is often driven by UIs that give users a modern look, feel, and experience—most critically, they make it easier for people to do business with the insurer.
Integration is essential to most best-of-breed digital strategies. The use of microservices has become a popular conversation due to the greater availability of solutions that allow web serviceable components, such as rating engines, to be accessed by multiple PAS solutions and distributors. A well-rounded set of eco-partners that have built and tested integrations and allow for ease of rollout provide insurers with even more capabilities to offer their digital users.
Nonetheless, challenges and issues exist as potential roadblocks to successful transitions from customers’ current environments to a digital platform. As with any new technology product, solution providers should articulate a very clear description of what their platform means to the customer as well as their transition path from current state to the digital platform. Communicating these two aspects is essential to gain buy-in from the insurer, plan resources, and carve out future capital requirements.
The digital platform as a concept is relatively new in the insurance world. Like any new technology, it requires time due to inherent complexities within the new solution, especially because the scope of a digital platform is broad and deep across insurance business processes. Is the platform stable? Is it scalable? Are the configuration and integration components bug-free? How many clients have implemented? How many clients have or are executing proofs-of-concept? How solid are the eco-partners? Questions abound. Novarica’s recent work in digital, which can be found at https://novarica.com/digital/, can be helpful when navigating the seas of new platforms.
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