InsurTech: How Digitalization is Transforming the Insurance Industry
Our world is becoming progressively more digital and today’s consumers are comfortable using new technologies. In fact, consumers expect digital experiences in every interaction in their lives including their interactions with insurers. This means that the future of insurance needs to become much more digital. Organizations can either prosper by becoming digital insurers or continue along the same path and watch their customers migrate to companies that offer more innovative products and services that better suit their needs.
In a highly competitive industry that is not traditionally known for innovation, rapid changes in demographics, technology, channels, and business models are creating significant opportunities for insurance companies to defend market share and increase revenue and margins.
At the center of this innovation is InsurTech, which is a swiftly growing field at the intersection of insurance and technology. Products range from AI to app-based solutions, but InsurTech companies differ in many ways from traditional Silicon Valley start-ups. Read on to learn more about how digital technology is revitalizing the insurance industry.
What is InsurTech?
InsurTech involves digital solutions for everyone involved in insurance including customers, agents, brokers, and employees. The field extends to companies that offer tracking solutions, wearables, AI applications, SaaS platforms, and all other potential digital solutions related to areas like underwriting, claims management, and quote and buy. A recent Gartner report reveals that 58% of insurers plan to increase funding for digital innovation through 2025.
The key to a winning InsurTech strategy lies in enhancing what insurance does best rather than seeking to “disrupt” the industry entirely. Companies that use technology with a personalized approach will stand out from InsurTech competition.
The “Uberization” myth: How adjacent innovation is a winning strategy
Many companies are obsessed with coming up with the next Uber for their industry. For that reason, they’re overly focused on disruptive innovations, meaning new products or services that completely upend existing markets or create entirely new ones. Like Uber, Netflix, or Airbnb.
But it is not always necessary to come up with a grandiose silver bullet idea in order to innovate. In fact, these kinds of projects are high risk and have a low chance of success. This means that these projects are often dreamed about and debated internally, but may never actually get off the ground.
While insurers should test disruptive ideas, they can also deliver business value quickly by focusing on adjacent product innovation. Simply put, adjacent innovation includes taking existing products into new markets and digital channels or creating new digital products for existing markets.
New technologies like wearables make existing products more tailored and user-based, new channels can help insurers sell products in new ways that better resonate with customer preferences and behavior, and new customer segments can help reshape an existing product to create a new offering.
What is adjacent product innovation in InsurTech?
Adjacent innovations keep one area stable, like the product or service, while focusing on creating a new and innovative go-to-market. By minimizing the number of completely new areas for a program, insurers can focus on creating value in one area by leveraging existing assets when they develop InsurTech solutions.
Adjacent innovations tend to scale fast because you are not creating everything from scratch, meaning it is a low-risk, high-value innovation.
Adjacent innovations also tend to scale faster because you are not creating everything from scratch, meaning it is a low-risk, high-value innovation. This allows you to rapidly create a minimum viable product (MVP) that shows quick impact and value that executives will want to champion. This type of innovation will ultimately change the culture of your organization for future innovation projects. The sooner you can show value and generate internal PR and executive buy-in, the quicker you can scale.
InsurTech product innovation strategies and benefits
The benefits of adjacent product innovation in InsurTech come down to what customers want and what area makes the most sense for organizations to drive toward. Many insurance companies find success transitioning to InsurTech through implementing technology solutions and innovation that enhances what the company already does very well in analog terms.
There are many insurers who are already practicing adjacent insurance innovation to deliver business value. One such company that is taking their existing products into a new channel is a specialty insurance company that wished to implement a new model allowing them to eliminate intermediaries and instead sell directly to the customer.
By cutting out the middleman (broker) and selling directly to the customer, this insurer can offer products at a lower, more competitive price because the cost of sales decreases. In turn, they can immediately increase revenue.
This is a high transactional model, so they created a multi-channel solution that is self-service and fast. They built an application for liability insurance that allows customers to get quotes and buy and manage their policy without needing to do any interaction offline. This flexible, automated solution supports the new business model of selling directly to customers, with the advantage of being able to come in with lower prices.
Another innovative insurance company wished to create a new version of their life insurance product to make it more simple, accessible, and transactional, enabling the customer to easily get a quote online and buy the product.
With the launch of new propositions into InsurTech, the group maintained its competitive advantage while also increasing premium volumes through more targeted products. A small team delivered the products in a matter of weeks versus the estimated four months. Their iterative releases also led to more frequent market feedback earlier in the go-live schedule, allowing the team to hone their product portfolio with additional releases.
Key takeaways
The important thing for insurers curious about entering the InsurTech field is to have a properly balanced innovation portfolio. Alongside experimenting with transformational ideas, think about processes to support rapid time to market for adjacent product innovations. Your process for digital innovation should be all about speed, agility, and low cost. Fostering a culture that supports a test-and-learn, fail-fast approach will get new ideas into the market quickly and at a low cost in order to see what works.