Library – Accenture: Elevate every decision with intelligent insurance operations

Executive summary :

2020 was an unusually challenging year for every industry

This is especially true for insurers. In addition to the business and economic disruptions of COVID-19, insurers saw catastrophic events linked to climate change upend historically reliable risk models.

Operational resilience is essential 

While these events left insurers exposed in many ways, they also revealed opportunities for insurers to elevate business performance—from driving cost savings from remote working models and benefiting from cloud operations to increasing digital customer acquisitions.

Harder, better faster stronger

Of the many lessons of the pandemic year, one resonates strongly in this industry: the importance of operational resilience.

As part of a global, cross-industry research initiative, we surveyed 100 insurance companies to understand how they view their journey to operations maturity. Operations maturity can translate into tech-savvy ways to acquire customers faster or discover new revenue growth. This means combining data, technology, processes and people into an intelligent, data-driven—and more resilient—operating model. It’s how insurers can reimagine the work people do and how it gets done—from sales and service to claims and finance. It’s also how they can offer next-level experiences for employees and customers.

Operations on the move

Accenture’s global research1 indicates that operating model maturity is advancing among global organisations and specifically insurers. Our research and experience reveal four levels of operations maturity: stable, efficient, predictive and future-ready. Each level is grounded in and enabled by progressively more sophisticated technology, talent, processes and data insight (Figure 1).

Achieving the highest level of maturity possible means some organisations become “future-ready.” On average, organisations we found to be future-ready showed a 2.8x boost in corporate profitability and 1.7x higher efficiency than at lower maturity levels, which is a promising indicator for insurers.

Planning for the future

A closer look at the data reveals that insurers’ progress toward future-readiness today is largely due to the operations maturity of a handful of players. For instance, only one out of 35 US respondents and two out of 20 in UK (which represent a larger portion of the respondents) consider themselves as future-ready today. Even so, insurers aspire to make more progress.

As Figure 2 shows, over the next three years, insurers expect to stay ahead of other industries, with 42% targeting a future-ready state, compared to just 34% across all industries.

Compare this to cross-industry averages of 7% and 34% respectively. Three years ago, no insurers identified as future ready, and just 23% called their operations predictive (Figure 2).

While there are pockets of operations leaders in this industry, insurers still have significant improvements to make and don’t want to get behind the curve in challenging markets. When it comes to change here, time is of the essence. That’s why insurers need a fast track for future-ready performance.

See the full report for more…

Link to Source:: click here