Ensuring enduring insurers

A paper by DXC Leading Edge

How can major insurance organisations take action to ensure they will be able to endure in the future?

What are major insurers doing to modernise their businesses to compete more effectively, and to stay relevant and healthy?

This paper discusses how these insurers evaluate and manage risk and cost principles for their insurance technology investments, and how they are finding the right balance between maintaining their existing solutions and making investments to capture new opportunities and exploring the potential capabilities of insurance technology ecosystem partners.

How to deal with unknown technology risk

In the first section of the paper we discuss how insurance leaders are trying to strike the right balance between maintaining their old income-generating assets and making new investments to modernise their businesses while maintaining their desired expense, loss and combined ratios. They are also trying to determine how fast they need to transform to manage competitive risk from possible new entrants.

Read the paper to see DXC Leading Edge’s view on the sorts of influences that we think are likely to create new insurance possibilities and some prerequisites for these possibilities to be realised.

Ten insurance behaviors predicting success

In the second section, based on our interviews and research in insurance and other regulated industries, we have identified 10 practical and replicable provocations for insurers to focus on.

We provide more detail on the behaviors that address significant industry drivers such as the need for customer focus, the profound change in IT cost structure, the role of transformational leadership and the potential of platforms and new risk data. Less obvious behaviors focus on alignment of technology strategy and the convergence of IT and business operating models.

These 10 provocations are:

1. Satisfying deep customer needs. “Our core belief is customer focus, it’s our number one topic.”
2. Operating model. Insurance business models and technology operating models have been treated as different things and they aren’t any longer.
3. Modernising technology. The stranded costs of insurance technology will choke future growth opportunities. Modernisation creates cost parity, but more importantly agility.
4. Insurance technology skills and ways of working. The transition from old skills and ways of working to new ones is going to be tough. You can’t tiptoe into this change, but there is hope.
5. Technology transformation risk. The most successful insurance technology transformers are using their core skills of understanding and balancing risk to digitalise more safely.
6. Technology strategy. Technology strategy becomes business strategy, and therefore a boardroom topic.
7. Insurance platforms and ecosystems. Simplification, consolidation and standardisation lead to insurance by configuration.
8. Sources of disruptive risk data. Where are the killer use cases for and differentiators of new data?
9. Transformational leadership behaviors. Transformational leadership, ownership and politics are complex. Successful leaders find the balance.
10. Competing more effectively. With every technology deployed, there’s a strategy to exploit it competitively.