CREATING A TECH-BASED FUTURE

While technology is moving at breakneck speed, it’s imperative to take a nimble yet considered approach.

By MARTIN WANLESS

In our professional and personal lives, we’ve all witnessed the adoption of technology by almost every business we deal with over the past decade – and over the past 12 months, it certainly seems to have ramped up a notch or two.

It’s completely understandable. Coming off the back of a global pandemic, which mercilessly highlighted any tech shortcomings a business had, organisations have spent the past few years implementing systems and processes to minimise any future disruption.

Of course, smart implementation of tech can have significant benefits for a business, staff and customers, and in insurance, the opportunities cannot be underestimated. From improving the customer experience and streamlining administration tasks for increased efficiency to enhancing underwriting ability, technology is playing an ever-increasing role.

“Technology is constantly evolving and impacting every aspect of the insurance process. Two of the more obvious ones are the use of underwriting data and reducing administration resources,” says David Hampton, CEO of BAIS Insurance Technology.

“Harnessing the power of underwriting data can help revolutionise the way the industry does business, from pricing to risk management.

“One of the main advantages of enhanced underwriting data is that it allows underwriters and brokers to better understand their customers. By analysing customer data such as demographic information, spending patterns, and insurance claims history, you can gain a deeper understanding of customer behaviour and preferences. This information can then be used to tailor insurance products to better meet the needs of specific customer segments.”

AVOIDING THE ‘BAND-AID’ APPROACH

While on a theoretical level, the opportunities that technology presents for insurance are clear, the challenge for the industry at large has been implementation and adoption.

And it’s a challenge that companies are going to have to meet head-on – and with the right ‘long game’, says Colin Fagen, Managing Director of BZI.

“There’s a multi-speed race underway at the moment when it comes to the adoption of technology in insurance.

“The larger organisations aren’t necessarily picking up the speed that much, while the nimble ones continue to move forward. We’re seeing some ‘band-aid’ fixes being applied at present, which will help improve productivity in the short term, but aren’t necessarily right for the medium term.

“The larger organisations have major projects that won’t be delivered for a number of years, and it’s a dynamic environment in which things are changing quickly where short-term delivery is very important.”

Keeping up with the rate of change for people actively using new tech is another challenge, identifies Adam Arkwright, Operations Manager at FocusNet Technology.

“From a user’s perspective, the challenge is keeping up with the rapid change to their working environment and workflow. Whilst the traditional role of the broker remains basically the same, the way they work day-to-day is changing. Effectively communicating the benefits of the technology to an industry that’s historically been pretty static, can be a challenge. We try to tackle this issue by ensuring the technology fits within traditional workflow where it makes sense.

“Technology changes very quickly and the two biggest challenges we’re seeing are keeping up-to-date with what is available to ensure you stay relevant, as well as ensuring that with the quickly changing tech, the associated cyber risks are accounted for.”

It’s important, too, that tech isn’t seen as a complete ‘solution’ in itself. It’s not a ‘set and forget’ and you need to work with the tech constantly.

“A major risk is that you leave it to do everything and don’t check whether it is meeting the needs of your clients,” says Hampton. “Are you confident the machine learning algorithms are being ‘taught’ correctly?”

Managing The Risks

As Arkwright identified, it’s incredibly important to be across the cyber risks that unfortunately come hand in hand with tech.

As with any platform, keeping systems and patches up-to-date is imperative. However, Fagen says security concerns are a key reason to avoid taking that ‘band-aid’ approach to tech.

“When cybersecurity has been ineffective, it’s often because there’s been a patchwork approach, retrofitting

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