Insure Think

The holidays are a great to reflect and review how things have gone. Let's look at Celent’s predictions from 2012.

Transformation can be a wonderful experience. It need not be dreaded or feared – it is something to be embraced with enthusiasm.

Is it time for insurance companies to start gravitating away from the business of managing large data centers to depend on the cloud?

As carriers employ drones, IoT devices, and wearables, they must understand and address the potential exposures from theft of the related information.

These alternative approaches are good news for the industry as they challenge the traditional, sometimes adversarial, relationship between insurer and insured.

Divisional CIOS must provide leadership and leverage their intimate knowledge of their business units needs with their knowledge of technologies and vendor capabilities.

The insurer is also pursuing drone technology stateside.

Not only is the API economy delivering business advantages, but also elevating the careers of IT professionals from systems maintenance roles to digital “provocateurs.”

Five initiatives related to the IoT were submitted. Three were focused on wellbeing, one on the connected home and one on drones.

Although the potential opportunities and threats are vast and varied, a number of important themes emerge.

Insurance is changing: it will be lean and 'just in time,' driven by the Internet of Things, digitally delivered and serviced.

For insurers, the key is to step up with new types of ways to think about offerings.

Insurers did most of the legwork on telematics, but must identify more value than just premium discounts.

We've seen “consumerization” continue to sweep through organizations, brushing aside the older ways of managing IT shops.

Life insurance is so far behind that it is not even in the e-delivery race.

While few efforts at an insurer are more complex or time consuming as a core system replacement, a major BI initiative will eventually touch all aspects of an organization.

With IBM's acquisition of The Weather Company and its large insurance customer base, Watson analytics may be able to help assess weather risks days before things happen.

What most boards don’t have is a committee that focuses on what many now believe to be the most impactful company function of all – technology.

Two of the key tools of innovation can bridge the gap that exists in the download between insurers and agents: actual ideation and crowdsourcing.

The message to insurers is strict and clear: one day the insurance industry will have its own Uber that comes in and disrupts the traditional insurance business model.

Lately, CIOs have been overwhelmed by the big data tsunami, as stated in a recent report out of Experian.

While noting that his company is hiring from Google and Amazon in order to spend it's $153 million tech budget effectively, the industry overall, Wilson says, is far behind other sectors when it comes to technology innovation.

As new technologies continue to emerge, how do we, as an industry, incorporate them into new or existing products and services?

Some carriers have recognized the challenge associated with attracting key talent to smaller markets and have taken the offensive to open satellite facilities that are in locations closer to where “the action” is.

Whether dealing with the end consumer or agents, insurers must be prepared to meet diverse standards for digital interaction.

Eighty percent of IT executives feel that IT departments have too narrow of a scope to be able to effectively ramp up the speed at which they delivery digital capabilities.

To find new opportunities, insurers should think about the questions that keep their prospective customers up at night and determine which are ripe for a new insurance offering.

With Volvo’s announcement that they would accept all liability for the car in autonomous mode we see the first of three steps towards the end of auto insurance.

No matter how many tools get introduced to workflows, there will always be a need for human judgement, oversight, and, most importantly, imagination.

Any given application may be the only point of contact a customer has with an insurer -- so it's important to take their experience seriously from the start.

The insurer went from FAA approval to claims inspection in about six months.

Telematics, data, insurance

Everyone is talking about the digital experience, but what does it really mean to go digital?

Insurers must recognize that for some consumers, offering value in exchange for their data is a key attraction.

With the industry moving headlong toward digitalization, those insurance hubs will increasingly become technology hubs as well.

Insurance CIOs need to be communicators and story tellers as well as effective managers.

IoT in insurance will allow the industry to move toward “casual analysis”: what are the true causes of loss and in what interventions can be undertaken to avoid them?”

Innovation does not always have to start with a big bang. It can start simple. Doing anything across 50 states is often a long, complex and expensive process, but it is possible to begin with an idea around a new model, product, channel and/or line of business to launch and experience innovation.

Whether or not one buys into the idea of sustained dialogue with our cars in the next decade, it is certain that the Internet of Things will require new forms of record keeping, of which it’s very likely that Blockchain technology will be a crucial component.

Insurers often ask us about voice recognition IVR, and now we will now be able to point to a working model.

The top-priority emerging technologies today for P&C are new payment technologies, the Internet of Things, wearables, and artificial intelligence.

“Frictionless” is a word that gests used a lot by vendors, but if everything were as frictionless as promised, we would be in cyber-heaven, wouldn’t we?

Managing reinsurance policies and claims with spreadsheet software is error-prone, slow and labor-intensive; regulatory compliance is difficult, and legitimate claims can slip through.

More than 80 percent of healthcare organizations have been compromised by cyber-attacks in past two years, according to KPMG.

Businesses have traditionally delivered complex documents to their customers using print delivery or electronics of the same printed output. This approach is not ideal for the mobile world where this highly regulated content must be viewable, actionable, and compliant across all of the devices that consumers use today.

Developing a common communications approach is a critical part of the CIO function. This checklist is a place to start for board meetings, presentations and for an IT leader’s communications with their board members.

Despite many rational and logical reasons to modernize core system technology, companies often put these decisions off for years or even decades, and impediments to change can come from unexpected directions.

While I've tried to articulate how some organizations get big data "right," it's frequently more compelling to explain how others seem to be getting it terribly "wrong."

While capital remains the primary tool that IAIS plans to use to ensure global insurer solvency, the IAIS demonstrated an apparent new openness to listening to those who had decried its rush to new standards, and its unwillingness to consider the equivalency of current local regimes.

As insurance companies increasingly digitize their operations, reach out to customers via apps and online services, and employ big data analytics for everything from telematics to fraud prevention, any hiccups in software delivery may mean delays and losses.

What we learn about securing data and communications from the Department of Defense.

Success in the future will depend on the capabilities we put in place to present an accurate map of what information resides where, and describes the actual quality level of that information.