The New Wave of Interactive Digital Platforms

For many years, portals–whether for agents, brokers, or policyholders–have provided an interactive front end for insurers. Traditional vended portal solutions along with pure custom development solutions have long provided insurers with portal capabilities. However, in recent times, insurance CIOs have been seeking alternatives to traditional portal solutions that offer better flexibility, speed to deliver, and tools and methods to improve user experience.

Two emerging solutions to carriers’ need for flexibility and improved user experience are digital experience platforms (DXPs) and application platforms-as-a-service (aPaaS). These different solution types, along with traditional Agent Portal applications, have different strengths in different areas, some of which are becoming more important to insurers:

• Digital marketing. Interaction-based features such as email campaigns, usage statistics, social media integration, and other marketing-driven features
• Content management. Data organization abilities for migrating information on insurer companies, contacts, products, and other general knowledge to websites
• UX. Building out user interface and user experience capabilities through code to include data capture fields, business rules, cross-field edits, and drop-down logic
• Process integration. Improving the integration and data-sharing capabilities between the UI and the core system logic, regardless of whether carriers store core system logic and UI logic together, separately, in-house, or with a third party
• Insurance-based logic and processes. Back-end or third-party system connectors for insurance-related screen and report layouts

DXPs can be a great option for those seeking a solution with strong digital marketing and transactional capabilities; but with little pre-configured insurance content, carriers should understand that they will likely have to build their own portals. However, there are existing insurance DXP solutions that have been outfitted for insurance-specific use. DXP vendors include DXC, EIS, EpiServer, Guidewire, Liferay, Sitecore, and ValueMomentum.

In contrast to DXPs, aPaaS have strengths in workflow and application integration and can be used to develop applications other than agent portals. aPaaS are often cloud-based and support both mobility and responsive design for optimized viewing on mobile devices. aPaaS solution vendors include eBaoTech, Majesco, Mendix, and Pegasystems.

For a more in-depth discussion of the capabilities of the new wave of interactive digital platforms and a breakdown of vendors operating in this space, read Novarica’s latest report, DXP and aPaaS for Insurers.