DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND THE LEGACY OF INSURANCE

The insurance industry is mid-transition during an economic slowdown and investment drought. So what does the immediate future look like?

WRITTEN BY: JOANNA ENGLAND

It’s fairly safe to say that, when it comes to digital transformation, the global insurance industry was a touch late to the party.

Incumbents were process and paperwork-heavy. Worse still, customers were conditioned to accept the status quo, which involved waiting weeks for claims to be processed and payments to be made – because that’s just how the system had always been.

Then COVID-19 came along and everything changed.

Newly-founded companies with high levels of tech in their business models fared well. But the insurance industry, the vast majority of which was still traditionally modelled using legacy systems, struggled to adapt.

Three years on, and the space looks very different. But so, too, does today’s global economic climate. And while transitioning to the cloud, adopting new technologies, and launching new products and services for relevance, the whole package comes with a high price tag.

The current state of digital adoption in insurance

Despite the reluctance of the insurance industry to embrace modern business models in the years preceding the