Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

The pandemic has caused various financial institutions to undergo a digital transformation as the number of customers carrying out online transactions grows rapidly. However, not only banks have seen an increase in their customers within the industry. Since many people are now prioritising their health, the insurance industry has also seen significant growth during these times.

As a result, just like any other business, organisations in the insurance industry are also accelerating their modernisation efforts to keep up with evolving customer demands.

“The whole ecosystem of the insurance industry has grown quite a lot. So, they need to have the right platform and technology that they can integrate with their business partners, with the whole ecosystem, to address the market as a whole”, explained Eric Quah, Country Manager, Red Hat Malaysia, in a virtual press briefing focusing on the topic ‘Modernising the Insurance Industry’.

According to him, consumers expect similar experiences online as with any other industry, such as faster processes as well as greater flexibility and convenience. In financial services, technology has now become a very strong enabler in terms of supporting these kinds of changes.

Expanding the discussion, Arvind Swami, Director, Financial Services, Red Hat APAC, said that with the advent of various technologies, more people are getting insured. “We are seeing more access to insurance provided through apps with smart devices. People in far-flung areas can access more insurance capabilities through apps on their hand rather than going to an office or relying heavily on paperwork”, he added.

For him, this means insurance companies now need to differentiate themselves in the market. In fact, Arvind said that 91% of organisations in the industry believe that the performance of their core systems differentiates their firm in the broad insurance marketplace.

However, many are only investing in the customer experience. Arvind said that it reaches a bottleneck because you can change customer experience only so much. Insurance firms also need to keep an eye on the core systems and focus on modernisation initiatives.

One important strategy in this journey is realising automation. “IT automation is important in the insurance industry because they have a huge set of legacy technology coupled with new innovative capabilities. That means they need to drive automation or take manual intervention out of it”, said Arvind.

He mentioned that this automation is not just limited to IT and technology but also around the business area. With Red Hat, Arvind said that insurance firms can realise modernisation among many aspects of their business. Red Hat can deliver:

• Core Insurance: Improve integration of core functions, speeding time delivery of information to lines of business.
• Automation: Automate critical business functions to improve customer and agent satisfaction.
• Connected Insurance: Modernised infrastructure to simplified integration with third-party apps.
• Digital Experience: Improve the customer experience by delivering innovation to policyholders and agents.

“This is also about ensuring they streamline all the processes from engagement, where an agent talks to a customer in terms of policy, to the processes of claims management, where a claim is submitted, processed and paid out, making it more efficient”, Arvind explained.

With modernisation, Arvind said that what insurers will try to look at is to move away from being seen as “slow, complicated and difficult to deal with” to more agile and nimble insurers in the future.

(0)(0)