Life & Annuities Insurance On The Transformation Road

The Life & Annuities insurance industry is following the same trajectory, starting on the transformation road after an inflection point during the pandemic. One of the biggest challenges that this industry is facing is the outdated legacy IT systems that impede a transformation. All this results in high IT and operational costs, and a more complex organizational structure with several inefficient processes.

However, it is important for companies to recognize that when transforming digitally, it is not enough to have a portal or a mobile application. Rather, it is about generating and providing innovative digital experiences for agents, policyholders and any other stakeholders. They need to offer them different services that adapt better for each type of customer, help them in the whole process, both internally and externally, and, overall, make their lives easier with the use of technology.

That is why, in recent years, we have seen how some insurers are reinventing themselves in the design of new, unparalleled customer-centric experiences. On the customer journey, following both artificial intelligence and data-driven strategies can help insurers to better understand customers' needs.

From NTT DATA's perspective, we have seen that there is a clear interest in increasing digitization and moving towards modern technologies. Insurers want to improve self-service and to be able to develop a user kind of technology but to do that, insurers are forced to decide for themselves what is the best technology option.

And we must make sure that the insurer has made the best selection of the options available in the market so the company will not be facing again a strong obsolescence process, which could have been avoided by a continuous modernization. The emergence of new technologies can be a weakness for an insurer that is not able to keep pace. In fact, a company that opts for an old-fashioned approach is assuming a lot of risks, because it may in front of a rather large investment that does not meet expectations.

Something we have been seeing for some years now is that some insurers are moving towards partnership models to accelerate their transformation. The key is to find the most optimal partner and ecosystem for the insurer to create value in its products and services. The three ways in which an insurer can accelerate their transformation journey are: by investing on their own and finding partners to help them transform their legacy environment, deciding to outsource legacy technology, processing or selling that business, or deciding to take a hybrid approach combining the other two options mentioned before.

From this understanding of the real needs of the market, NTT DATA has developed the Global Insurance Digital Platform (GIDP). GIDP is an ecosystem of IT assets from leading technology vendors. We understand that companies cannot excel at everything, so it is important to make the best possible technology available to them in the most affordable way possible and implement it in the most seamless way. GIDP enables our customers to quickly deploy leading technology with future-proof because, as a BPO provider, we are highly incentivized to have the technology that gives us the lowest cost so our processes are efficient and productive.

From NTT DATA we encourage Life & Annuities executives to consider all of the challenges (and our solutions) mentioned in our new Thought Leadership document, in order to define the best transformation path for their business that will lead them to a digital future vision.