Insurance Thought Leadership – Insurtechs’ role in transformation
Executive summary :
Given the nature of insurance, and the possibilities that data analytics and technology offer, there should be little doubt that the industry is moving toward becoming a technology industry.
It is therefore only natural that insurers are looking for ways to reinvent themselves as technology companies, running corporate-wide digital transformation projects to ensure adjustment to the changing markets and secure a competitive position in the future.
Incumbents, it’s all down to you
This white paper demonstrates how insurtechs are important for the development of the industry but also underlines that insurtech does not address all challenges faced when creating a future successful insurer – insurtechs are digital instruments to be used in the transformation journey, but it’s still up to the incumbent to get the real transformation done.
The insurtech landscape mid-2020
Given the pace of the market development, it makes little sense to provide a fully updated and detailed state-of-insurtech – it does makes sense, however, to understand the underlying nature of the insurtech landscape to examine how insurtechs are entering and affecting the insurance industry.
This understanding will provide insurers with a future outlook and enable the development of adequate strategic responses – this will also help insurers to identify if and where insurtechs can fit into insurers’ value chain.
Money, money, money
More than 75% of total dollar investments are invested in insurtechs offering products and services within distribution, and a total of 79% of all investments are in single-line insurtechs.
These two numbers, 75% of investments in products and services within distribution and 79% of all investments in single-line insurtechs, combined with insurtechs’ focus in the insurance value chain (see below) clearly show that insurtechs are focusing on specific areas of the total insurance value chain and not in creating new, full-fledged insurers.
Looking for opportunities
The insurtechs seems to be zooming in on the areas that have the greatest business and growth potential and leaving out the less lucrative parts of the entire insurance value chain, which makes perfectly good business sense. You would only enter into industry areas with high inertia and potential for fast improvements.
Following the numbers from Figure 1, it appears that the structural issues impeding insurers to realize transformations at scale and speed are not addressed in particular by the insurtechs in the market.
Successful transformation of incumbent insurers requires more than a digital front end or various, isolated digital innovations – granted, it may add to the overall value provided to the customers or partners, but the underlying structural and process challenges still exist in the incumbents and still need to be redesigned for the insurer to reach the future virtual and digital state.
The importance of partnership
As shown later, some insurers are already partnering with insurtechs and benefiting from improved, isolated processes within distribution, sales, policy servicing and claims management, but very few – if any – have created a cohesive end-to-end experience for the customers and partners.
Partnering with an insurtech for a specific element of the value chain still leaves it with the incumbent insurer to realign, adjust and connect surrounding processes in an effort to create a complete customer-oriented solution.
See the full report for more…
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