CIOInsider India Magazine

Vishwa is a business leader with over a decade of experience in the BFSI sector. He currently serves as EVP- Growth at Nvest Solution, a leading InsurTech company that provides end-to-end digital solutions for insurance carriers and distributors.

Insurance has been widely accepted as a financial tool to help individuals and families maintain their quality of life in case of unforeseen events. If something happens to a bread winner of a family of four (Husband, Wife and two kids), whether due to critical illness or an accident that confines them and restricts their earning potential, Insurance can help the family meet their ends. It may happen that one may need different types of insurance products to secure themselves and their families from all possible consequences.

As we look ahead, the next wave of insurance adoption will depend on digital and phygital solutions that offer seamless, accessible and context-aware protection. To enable this, insurers must transform their systems to become truly agile, capable of rapidly launching personalized options, creating combos effectively and adapting quickly to evolving needs.

The State of Insurance Penetration
If we talk about insurance coverage and penetration, it varies from developing to developed nations. While developing nations are at one percent to four percent insurance penetration with more than 60 percent to 80 percent of their population uninsured, Developed nations are at 10 percent to 12 percent in terms of penetration with more than three-quarters of their population insured.

While the next goal for developing nations is to increase penetration close to developed nations to bring most of the population under the insurance umbrella, the developed nations are trying to move the population from under insured to sufficient coverage to ensure minimal financial impact of any unforeseen events.
In both the markets, developing and developed, governments and insurance companies are trying to embrace digital transformation so that they can increase their reach to more people and offer insurance.

The Gap in Digital Transformation

If one sees the digital transformation initiatives taken up by insurance companies, one will find that the majority of transformation has occurred in the front-end and distribution space which has solved the customer reach problem to some extent but there’s a major part which has not seen much transformation, namely, core systems of insurance companies and related back-end processes. While the distribution side of transformation has addressed customer reach, the problem of adoption remains and that can be solved only when customers have a delightful experience both pre and post sales. For an insurance product, customers experience their first moment of truth when they try to understand the product, benefits, out-flows and in-flows and the other happens when the customer or beneficiary needs to claim those benefits.
Both these processes are heavily back-office led as distribution journeys just play the role of passing the information they are receiving from the internal systems.

In my opinion, there have been a good number of investments in both front-end and back-end systems but back-end core systems are long term purchases for insurance companies and that’s why after a few years, core systems may encounter limitations in terms of functionalities and scalability required for present growth. This is where I believe a connecting layer is missing which is agile, can be linked to both front-end and back-end systems and enhance the capabilities of the core systems.

The Missing Link: Configuration Layer
This layer is basically a configuration layer which can help modernize legacy systems and offer scalability and better functionalities. Configurators may be of different types to offer different functionalities.

Robust Product Configurator provides agility to add/ delete new options in the product. This helps in reducing time to market for insurance companies.

Proposal Form Configurator provides flexibility to customize the proposal form for specific channel- D2C, Brokers, Agents etc.

API Configurator makes it easier to integrate with ecosystem partners through APIs without any code level integrations. This can revolutionize partner led distribution with faster time to market for partners like Banks, large brokers and corporate agents.

Journey Configurator provides the flexibility to customize specific journeys for a particular channel and provides insurers with the desired controls over business.

UI and Workflow Configurator help design workflows and User Interfaces based on back-end configurations and saves time and effort of creating interfaces.

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Transaction and Accounting Configurators enhance PAS functionalities by adding more flexibility and speed.

To summarize, these configurators can form a digital layer on top of the existing systems and enhance the functionalities and performance of the current stack without changing core. This type of digital transformation is required for a holistic transformation and driving adoption by offering true value to customers.