Property/casualty (P/C) insurers have always led the industry in adopting emerging technology to sell products in new and easier ways, provide better customer experiences, and improve operating efficiencies. From Novarica’s studies of P/C insurer CIOs as well as conversations with insurers and vendors, it’s apparent that the P/C policy administration market continues to flourish for vendors with systems meeting modern demands.
One factor that often leads to system replacements is digital engagement. This can be driven by a desire to attract and retain top producers, as well as to provide policyholders and claimants with a satisfying digital experience. Newer generations of producers and policyholders have higher expectations for technology and usability and won’t tolerate the inefficiencies and poor user experience that legacy solutions offer.
The Evolution of Digital
The delivery of digital capabilities related to PAS is evolving. Historically, the primary mechanisms that insurers used to engage with external stakeholders were the agent and policyholder portals. Early portals were often homegrown and integrated with policy systems using database extracts or rudimentary APIs.
Recognizing a market need, vendors began to offer portal capabilities as a part of their core suites. Solutions either involved exposing the PAS interface directly to agents and using security to limit the experience or the creation of out-of-the-box portals dedicated to agents and/or policyholders. While the latter solution offers a viable option, especially for smaller insurers, insurers often still chose to continue on the custom portal path.
Usually, this was because they believed that a custom portal was a competitive differentiator or because they had multiple PAS solutions in play and wanted to offer a unified portal experience, something that was often not easily achieved with a vended portal, which was limited to interacting with the vendors’ back-end system only.
Digital Platforms: Customized and Unified
A recent development is the emergence of the “digital platform” as a replacement or alternative to the canned portal. Digital platforms are low-code solutions that aim to address the shortcomings of both canned and custom portals. The use of low-code technology allows insurers to fully customize the user experience for competitive advantage, as well as to integrate with alternate back-end systems to provide a unified experience regardless of which back-end system houses the policy.
While not as flexible as fully custom portals, digital platforms allow for more rapid delivery of capabilities because of the low-code tooling, pre-built content, content management, social media integration, chat, and chatbots. Pre-built integrations with commonly used services for underwriting, claims, and payment processing also act as an accelerator to value.
The use of these digital platforms is not limited to delivery of portal capabilities. Vendors are increasingly positioning these as stand-alone platforms for more general digital needs. Similarly, the horizontal low-code vendors are increasingly competing in this space by offering insurance-specific content and accelerators to insert themselves into the insurance value chain.
Modern P/C solutions are maturing, giving insurers better options than ever before. To learn more about the trends and vendors in this space, our annual Novarica Market Navigators contain in-depth profiles and comparative tables on 48 property/casualty and 23 life/annuity/benefit PAS vendors.
Add new comment