The COVID-19 viruses take no prisoners. Even insurance firms –experts in theoretical crisis planning and risk analysis –never anticipated a disaster of this magnitude. Worse, they were left with an impossible decision: make good on bulk of pandemic-related insurance claims or risk losing their ranks as institutions of trust .

Despite the damage it caused; the global pandemic strengthened the Insurance industry in general. The crisis held a mirror to organizational inefficiencies and vulnerabilities, prompting them to accelerate their path to a more technology driven future. A journey that would set them on the path to profitable and sustainable competitive advantage in years to come.

A recent study, conducted by PWC, identified that “15% of survey takers say they are likely to purchase life insurance due to the impact of COVID-19,” likewise “37% fear that the pandemic may bring future financial impact on their retirement plan” (). Now that’s a superb opportunity.Pioneers in the insurance industry are adopting the following strategies to capitalize on the current market

Invest in Diversity and Technology. Investing in the future of insurance is not limited to stock portfolios, but also includes a more inclusive and diverse work environment. Many studies have validated that a diverse workplace speaks to their values and market share, alike. For instance: data reports find that the healthcare industry were able to correlate a higher number of female employees with a propensity to outperform their competition by upwards of 18 percentage points.

Accelerate Digital Transformation: The global pandemic imposed fully remote work culture on a sizable number of firms, many of which did not have the technological infrastructure to support the transition. The crisis has bolstered the necessity for businesses to embrace digitization and automation of their data. This change has already generated a lot of growth opportunities in areas such as selling, servicing, and customer relationship management. Any firm intending to capitalize this growth trajectory will have to adopt a modernized framework that enables efficient and informed decision making.

Systech Solutions offers modernization of legacy systems, services designed to support strategical, technological, and digital transformation journey. Not only does a modernized workflow helpwith customer retention, but also allows businesses to offer personalized customer service solutions to each individual. What’s more, migrating to an agile cloud infrastructure helps build a resilient architecture that allows businesses to support their growing business requirements and to speed up their delivery of products to market.

Operational Enablement to fosterinnovation: The alignment of technology, processes, and people helps fortify clear and strategic initiatives in every sector of the business. In fact, operational enablement may be one of the most effective ways to support innovation efforts. Many insurance firms have already turned their attention toward digital customer interaction at every level of their insurance journey. Specifically, they’ve begun to “augment their underwriting through the use of new data sources and decision models [while also] investing in improving data capture and ingestion, especially with regard to unstructured data such as audio and video.” The centralization of information plays a powerful role in addressing the surge of remote work and data capture relating to claims, submissions, and concerns.

The pandemic highlighted the need of “digital-first” strategies. It also emphasized the demand for seamless customer service and touchless claims. Commercial insurers, for example, have already invested in remote risk identification with the hopes that it will allow customers to use imaging more effectively for underwriting risk and policy eligibility. These changes toward a greater sense of visibility into processes and functions is conducive to building trust and loyalty between firms and customers. While these policies are not entirely new, there is no doubt that the scale and speed has picked up significantly.

Align of firms and carriers with help of AI/ML: The more closely a firm is aligned to the needs of their partners, the better positioned they are for the future. Whether in underwriting, customer experience, or claims — performance of an innovative offering will be largely contingent on how accurately it addresses a demand. AI/ML has proven to be a inevitable in such initiatives.

Systech Solutions offers an extensive B2B solutions designed to complement the carrier’s value chain. Dopplr™ — Systech’s “Intelligence Anywhere” platform – transforms raw data into data-driven decisions to help businesses forecast, predict, and prescribe actionable insights in near real-time. This technology can be instrumental in an insurance firm’s ability to offer “the newest and the best”, and to maintain a technological advantage over their competition, while also ensuring carrier-insurance loyalty down the line.

Looking ahead: the insurance industry at a glance. The global pandemic highlighted the weaknesses and strengths of all industries, alike. Its impact on the insurance industry highlighted a dire need to innovate and modernize in all sense of the word.

These developments have helped insurance companies address changes in customer loyalty to carriers, attitudes toward each sector of insurance, and their service preferences, and work them in their benefit.

Whether revamping their data analytics infrastructure to support finicky customers – or championing a workforce as diverse as the community they service – there is no doubt that firms are gearing up for a long and profitable future in the years to come.

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