Having had our neck-deep serving smart technology solutions for the insurance sector for the last three decades, we sincerely feel the time is up for disruptive innovation.
It is time to radically change the way insurers look at their business and bring in technology interventions. Moreover, it is important to look at how is the technology procured and how does it impact business in terms of cost of ownership and time spent!
Why is the radical shift/ disruption needed?
Today, when we look at any conventional tech solutions in the market and the way insurers procure them, there’s a high cost of opportunity lost. The software evaluation process takes anywhere between 4-9 months followed by the implementation taking around 9 to 18 months. Moreover, most solutions do not offer independent components, so it takes almost 1.5 – 3 years to address specific business needs. Sadly, 30-40% of the projects either get abandoned or do not completely meet the business needs, leading to further loss of time and money, not excluding the inherent risk involved in most IT initiatives. The pace of business transformation further adds to the complexity.
To sum it up, most insurers are going through an elaborate process of procuring the solution, taking a long time to implement it on-premise or cloud, at prohibitively high costs and at a similar or possibly even higher rate of failure.
Now, aren’t we dragging our feet at the cost of poor distributor/customer experience and losing out on valuable business?
What are the Insurance companies looking for?
In the competitive market where the insurance needs of the consumer are fast evolving, where distributors are expecting growth as insurance advisors, better compensation and faster sales closures, it is imperative for the insurers to launch new, differentiated offerings in a matter of weeks. Quicker time to market is a critical requirement for survival and growth.
It is critical to have quick business benefits realization through shorter implementation cycles, in order to stay ahead of the competition. It is equally important to have quick releases of evolving business needs on an ongoing basis. All this needs to happen at an acceptable cost of ownership.
Why have current technology solutions not been able to address the need?
There’s a distinct lack of extensively configurable solutions and those that meet the needs of global insurance markets. This results in – a long time to market and a high cost of implementation.
Insurers, therefore, need a solution that works on the cloud at an industry/ market level, based on a managed services model, so that they can subscribe to what they need, when they need it, at an affordable price, are able to test what works for them in the shortest possible turnaround time and has the ability to scale with the adoption of additional services.
How large is this opportunity? Is it relevant for global markets?
The pandemic has forced insurers to look out of the box and evolve their operating model. There is an increased need to evolve products that are targeted towards specific customer or distributor segments and manage sales processes digitally. The insurers are also exploring cloud-based services to reduce costs and improve speed.
The need for agile point solutions is now higher than ever before. There is an incumbent need for quick realization of business benefits. The developed insurance markets are operating at a higher cost and lower agility than developing insurance markets. To us, it is amply clear that there is a need for transformation in the buying landscape in most insurance markets globally.
Why is C2L BIZ well-positioned to alter the buying landscape favorably?
Our extensive experience has empowered us to build highly configurable solutions that reduce the time and cost of first-time implementation and also minimize the ongoing cost and time incurred.
We have really understood the needs and nuances of global insurance markets with depth and precision, so our proven solutions comprehensively cover and support most business needs of insurers. Our solutions are multi-lingual, multi-currency and cloud-native. We are committed round-the-clock, with our offshore support model, to every insurer who has installed our solution, thus reducing the total cost of ownership for the insurer. To help insurers achieve self-sustainability, we even help them configure their own products, incentives, channels, etc on our solution.
What about C2L BIZ offerings that are transformational?
C2L BIZ has launched (and continues to launch) solutions to address specific business needs of each market, on the cloud, based on a pay-as-you-go model. The intent is to make these services available within a shorter time frame and at an affordable price. Once an insurance company experiences success in the form of measurable business outcomes, it can expand the scope of current services or add more services. For example, if the company wants to launch new incentives for its distributors or launch a new partner with a differentiated compensation scheme, it could opt for Incentive as-a-service from our SymbioSys DMS, run it with 2-3 incentives to begin with and evaluate success. If it delivers as expected, the insurer can choose to launch more incentives using the same service.
So, instead of buying an entirely new solution at a high cost, with a long gestation period, the insurer can now buy a specific service at a reduced cost of ownership with a faster implementation cycle and can add newer products later. The clear advantage of this model is that the buyer doesn’t have to invest in infrastructure and manpower at this stage.
Even with an industry-proven offering, the insurer may still have doubts, so the opportunity to test it out at a lower cost and time of implementation is really the key here.
We hope that insurers worldwide respond to the need of the hour and opt for digitally resilient, cloud-based, highly configurable and scalable services available on a pay-as-you-go model.