I was reading a P&C Specialist article that reported on three Insurer CEO’s (Kemper’s Joseph Lacher, Chubb’s Evan Greenberg and Hanover’s John Roche) thoughts on the role of AI in insurance. During it Greenberg said something that illustrates a huge flaw in most carrier managements thinking about technology:
However, one area where the technology has had an impact is in speeding up carriers’ cycle times, or the time it takes to complete a task from start to finish. “Most [insurance] companies, I’d say their cycle times change in two or three years; our cycle time changes roughly once a year and we’re trying to lower that now to two months,”
Did you see it?
He’s talking about the cycle time to make changes within the IT process. Which is inherently slow and expensive. And while trying to speed it is a great goal, it misses the point: the goal should be to stop running all change through IT. To develop tools and workflow that allow business teams to find, design, test and deploy innovative solutions without needing the IT organization to midwife them. What the Gartner Group calls a “Composable Architecture”.
An example of a Composable Architecture is our Risk Selection and Alternative Workflow Solution, idFusionTM : idFusion lets non-IT carrier teams find and value new risk selection and other in-transaction improvement opportunities. And then once found, to develop the rules and interventions necessary to operationalize them before a risk is taken. The results include:
- Rapidly increasing the speed in which in-transaction risk selection, agent management and customer segmentation solutions can be designed, tested and deployed: from months or years to days or weeks.
- At least a tenfold increase in the number of issue specific solutions that can be developed, resulting in far more precise management of specific excess risk, cost and satisfaction issues. Indeed, many ‘minor’ million dollar ‘leaks’ that were too expensive to address, can now be addressed quickly.
- A much better ability to detect and respond to emerging issues and opportunities now, before competitors can.
- Eliminating many small ‘incremental changes’ that consume most of the typical carrier’s IT budget, freeing them to spend their time developing more strategic capabilities.
What is required is a range of tools that speed the process of risk discovery, detection and intervention and deploy them during insurance transactions via an alternative workflow that does not interfere with the vast majority of insurance transactions. By using this approach, our carriers have seen dramatic improvement in loss and combined ration results in personal auto lines.
