This submit is a part of a sequence sponsored by AgentSync.
At present’s insurance coverage businesses depend on a median of 5.7 to 11.9 totally different expertise platforms for day-to-day operations, relying on their complete income. For big-scale carriers managing a number of businesses and their downstream producers, it’s possible that quantity is even larger. Whereas this degree of digital innovation represents a optimistic change within the insurance coverage business’s skill to supply trendy experiences to its shoppers and environment friendly workflows to its workers, cultivating a extra strong tech stack doesn’t come with out challenges.
Every time an insurance coverage group invests in a brand new digital answer, it’s creating higher efficiencies for a minimum of one piece of the insurance coverage distribution puzzle. When a enterprise begins out, it could solely have the sources to buy probably the most important expertise, like an e-mail utility and a bookkeeping software program. Because the enterprise grows, it invests in additional expertise to assist handle the rise in purchasers and workers — an HR system, a buyer relationship administration (CRM) system, a compliance administration answer, and so forth.
Whereas these methods little doubt create higher efficiencies for the enterprise, there’s no denying the irony that the extra advanced your tech stack will get, the extra inefficient it will probably grow to be. In reality, it’s not unusual that, as carriers and businesses buy extra methods, they uncover some massive issues.
How does a fancy tech stack affect your insurance coverage enterprise?
Poor integration capabilities result in fragmented methods
The extra methods you add to your tech stack, the extra necessary it’s for these applied sciences to speak with each other. However with as a lot as 74 p.c of insurance coverage firms nonetheless counting on legacy expertise for his or her core enterprise capabilities, seamlessly linking current methods to new ones in order that they operate collectively in a significant manner isn’t precisely the norm. Older methods use totally different information codecs, protocols, and buildings than trendy options. These variations may cause important compatibility points that make integrations extra advanced and in the end result in system fragmentation.
Silos restrict sensible, data-driven enterprise choices
Your distribution channel is full of information on each downstream accomplice you’re employed with. Proactive insurance coverage organizations use this information to intelligently increase, contract, and restructure their distribution channels in response to shifting market alternatives and challenges. Consequently, data-driven companies are 23 occasions extra more likely to purchase new clients and 19 occasions extra more likely to obtain above-average profitability than their much less data-driven counterparts. Nonetheless, information silos, a typical symptom of lackluster integrations between a number of methods, make it tough to leverage producer information for knowledgeable choices. Silos forestall producer information from flowing seamlessly by your methods, creating a number of variations of fact in your data and making it tough to decipher the place probably the most correct info truly lives.
Scalability points forestall worthwhile progress
Relating to sustainable progress, automated options have been an actual game-changer for the insurance coverage business. For instance, nowadays, with the best distribution channel administration answer, any provider onboarding an company and its a number of downstream producers can validate a number of licenses throughout a number of traces of authority and a number of states all on the click on of a button. Not all that way back, the identical course of was solely achievable by hours, if not days, of handbook work. Nonetheless, not all automations are created equally and lots of legacy applied sciences lack the power to scale effectively, making it simply as tough to develop with out additionally rising overhead prices.
Disjointed methods enhance safety and compliance dangers
Complicated and ever-changing regulatory necessities type the spine of the insurance coverage business (critically, we have now an entire sequence about it), making compliance more and more advanced to keep up. Staying on high of rules and avoiding penalties is especially difficult if you’re coping with disjointed methods which might be unable to replace in real-time, creating inconsistencies in your distribution community information. On high of compliance danger, information safety is a significant concern for companies with a fancy tech infrastructure. In a research analyzing the state of cybersecurity throughout the insurance coverage sector, SecurityScorecard discovered that third-party software program and IT vulnerabilities have been responsible for half of the information breaches reported by 150 high insurance coverage corporations.
Funds predictions reveal a higher deal with decreasing IT complexity
Between the pitfalls of a fancy tech stack and the ongoing market volatility and consequent price range tightening of the previous few years, it could come as a suprise that specialists predict an enhance in tech spend throughout the insurance coverage business over the following yr. However, digging somewhat deeper into the place and the way companies plan to make use of these funds paints a clearer image.
With talks of tech consolidation from big-name gamers like GEICO, and higher strain on IT departments to ship quicker ROI, it’s possible we’ll see much less prioritization on multi-year, advanced technological overhauls and higher funding in lower-lift, modular options to assist consolidate fragmented infrastructure, scale back vendor administration complexities, simplify workflows, and unlock deeper information analytic capabilities.
The main target shift makes much more sense when you think about the truth that many insurance coverage carriers and businesses have already invested a long time of time and tens of millions of {dollars} into their current methods. Relating to their IT, these of us aren’t seeking to reinvent the wheel a lot as they’re searching for complement options that can increase their effectivity with as little enterprise interruption as doable.
The answer: Investing in APIs to cut back tech complexity and increase operational effectivity
For companies with current distribution channel administration ecosystems, utility programming interfaces (APIs) supply an answer for bettering operational effectivity with out ripping and changing present methods. Modernizing massive and complicated methods, like these used to handle your insurance coverage distribution channels, can take months or years. APIs scale back tech complexity and get probably the most full and up-to-date producer information flowing by your methods extra shortly and effectively than ever earlier than. Carriers and businesses that put money into APIs profit from their:
Improved integration capabilities: APIs combine immediately into a corporation’s current platforms, opening the door for extra seamless information trade between disparate methods and eliminating bottlenecks in every day workflows.
Seamless, safe scalability: By leveraging APIs that derive information from business sources of fact, companies can focus much less of their time and sources on information upkeep as their enterprise grows, and extra on taking advantage of the tech infrastructure that drives their core enterprise processes.
Actual-time information: APIs can elevate distribution community information high quality by synchronizing a corporation’s current tech (and the information that lives inside it) with business sources of fact. Slightly than counting on handbook information validation, APIs mechanically guarantee producer information is all the time up-to-date and helpful.
By leveraging APIs, insurance coverage carriers and businesses can remodel their tech infrastructure from advanced, fragmented, and inefficent to agile, linked, and trendy. Consequently, they’ll keep away from spending the money and time wanted to finish a complete system overhaul and acquire higher visibility into their distribution channel information throughout their current platforms.
Let AgentSync’s ProducerSync API meet you the place you’re at
If tech complexity is obstructing key distribution channel information from flowing by your current methods, then your information’s not doing you a lot good. From surfacing key producer information when and the place you want it (assume earlier than binding a coverage or paying out a fee), to extremely refined analyses on how you can optimize your distribution channel for optimum success, ProducerSync API may be the tech enhancement what you are promoting wants on the value and implementation timeline it desires.
Contact certainly one of our specialists at present to learn the way your group may gain advantage from ProducerSync API.
