Connecting Data to Accelerate Digital Transformation in Insurance

Last week, MarkLogic presented at the Insurance Innovators’ Connected Insurance event in London. The event brought together over 200 decision-makers and experts from across the European insurance sector to discuss the latest technology disrupting the industry. For MarkLogic, this provided a great opportunity to talk about the critical role of data and the value in obtaining a 360-degree view of data for accelerating digital transformation and improving the customer experience in insurance. Here is an overview of what we presented.

InsurTech – The Threat that Inspires

The insurance industry is currently seeing a surge in investment in InsurTechs—agile technology-led companies that are driving higher customer expectations through the digitalisation of transactions and processes. Overall investment in InsurTechs has ballooned from $348M in 2012 to $4.2B in 2018. The emergence of InsurTech and of technology-enabled providers is widely deemed to be “the threat that inspires,” driving incumbent insurers to make better use of data assets to improve the customer experience and remain competitive. The problem is that many organisations are still relying on large and complex legacy technology to implement systems that are not yet ready for the digital world.

For digital transformation to take place, insurers need to prioritise enhancements to data and analytics capabilities, which will in turn transform the customer experience, improve claims management processes and deliver more precise underwriting and policy pricing. Unfortunately, for many insurers, this process is by no means simple. The common difficulty is accessing and utilising data, which stems from sub-optimal upstream data integration commonly found in legacy IT infrastructure. The bottom line is that without an agile and effective data integration strategy and a customer-centric approach, insurers risk falling behind in a highly competitive and digitally transforming market.

Successful digital transformation for insurers hinges on robust technology solutions that can integrate valuable data into a single system from a wide variety of silos, legacy systems and even old paper records in a quick and cost-efficient way. At MarkLogic, we believe there are three pillars to successful digital transformation:

1. Obtaining a 360-Degree View of the Customer

All too often, critical information about customers resides in silos and in different formats across an organisation. These include traditional sources such as customer management and service systems, billing systems, and in policies and claims, both structured and unstructured data. To be truly customer-centric, insurers must be able to gather data from all of these sources to obtain a consistent, transparent, 360-degree customer view.

2. The Ability to Access and Analyse All of Your Data

Customer and policy data not only resides in different locations, but in different formats and schemas, including text documents, PDFs, graphs, images and other IoT devices. In order to consolidate and curate all of these sources, insurers need a multi-model database that can allow access to every piece of relevant data for actionable insight to be unlocked.

3. A Flexible, Future-Proof Infrastructure

Traditional insurance carriers can too often be handicapped by legacy IT systems that render it impossible to integrate and manage growing data demands, opening the door for InsurTechs. Insurers need a flexible solution that can evolve with changing data formats, the cloud imperative and customer demands in the future. Multi-model databases provide flexibility for growth, ensuring that companies can support both the existing and new data sources required to continuously improve operations and deliver a better customer experience.

In order to achieve successful digital transformation, a traditional approach is no longer optimal. In fact, legacy IT infrastructure creates a costly and rigid barrier to evolution and positive outcomes for insurance. With a robust NoSQL platform, like an Operational Data Hub for Insurance, insurers can integrate, harmonise and serve accurate data in real time.

Modern, flexible databases such as the MarkLogic® database can provide a unified 360-degree view to businesses that includes of all their data, making it easy to bring data together and add context to it so that actionable insights can be quickly derived. With support for secure operations, accurate reporting and analysis over the full lifecycle of data, MarkLogic’s agile platform makes it easier for insurers to innovate faster to adapt to customers’ changing needs and accelerate digital transformation to remain competitive.