Reporter's notebook: Insurtech Connect, more insights

For Safety National Casualty Corporation, innovation starts with the submission of information, says Cyndee Morton, chief operating and innovation officer of the company, which specializes in workers compensation insurance. If brokers find it complex to get data into the right digital format with all the areas being contained in it, such as losses and exposures, Safety National found it could turn to Groundspeed Analytics, Morton said. 

Safety National does have to use robotic process automation (RPA) to bring that data into a "mailbox," she added, which sends the data to Groundspeed, which in turn structures it and gets it back to Safety National "within an hour."

Lukasz Strozek, chief technology officer at Hippo Insurance, in an interview, spoke about the rationale for the company's home health assessment. "It gives our customers a sense of strengths and challenges that they may run into in the home," he said. "What might they want to work on and what's great. It's supposed to be a dynamic thing. It's supposed to be a thing that evolves over time. We also come up with a checklist for them that allows them to improve their assessment. It's a really good, very simple idea that says, this is your assessment and we'll be there for you to make that assessment better, to improve that assessment." The home health assessment is a "big differentiator" for Hippo, he added.

Low-code, no-code programming has become increasingly popular among insurance carriers looking for solutions to operations technology issues, according to Doug McElhaney, partner in the insurance practice of McKinsey & Co.

"It bridges the gap between an organization that historically has been very comfortable building their own, to not totally outsource all my development, but democratize it to a degree that they can get more people developing solutions versus having just a very technical IT team," he said. "More of the major software players have gotten the message. They're now saying they're going have a no code or low code component to applications.

"My clients need to be able to respond to emerging trends that might impact their books and economic performance," McElhaney added. "They have to be able to adjust underwriting models, and adjust pricing two to four time faster than they have. They need to increase the level of automation they have in those sorts of processes."