SaaS in the city

Here we are, at the dawn of a new decade, but for far too many re/insurers the tech­nol­o­gy deployed as they enter 2020 is fright­en­ing­ly sim­i­lar, if not the same, to the tech they were using when they were par­ty­ing like it was 1999.

Any­one who has worked at a large, well-estab­lished insur­er knows this is not an exag­ger­a­tion. Many insur­ance enter­pris­es are run­ning lay­ers of out­dat­ed tech­nol­o­gy and too many high­ly skilled back-office teams are cur­rent­ly mired in “just keep­ing the lights on”, a time-inten­sive and expen­sive process that adds to already sig­nif­i­cant tech­ni­cal debt accu­mu­la­tions.

This sce­nario results in more fre­quent sys­tem down­time and a lack of inter­op­er­abil­i­ty that makes oth­er inef­fi­cien­cies almost unavoid­able, con­sti­tut­ing a mas­sive expense and drain on resources for the sec­tor when it comes to upgrades.

Layers of legacy

Indeed, the major­i­ty of respon­dents to a recent inde­pen­dent sur­vey of more than 100 senior insur­ance exec­u­tives char­ac­terised their IT infra­struc­ture as con­sist­ing of mul­ti­ple lega­cy sys­tems oper­at­ing across a host of dif­fer­ent IT ven­dors and often falling behind with upgrades.

In par­tic­u­lar, it was clear that sys­tems upgrades and main­te­nance can cause a huge drag on the effi­cien­cy of a busi­ness and reg­u­lar­ly impact the work­ing life of staff, in some instances caus­ing major dis­rup­tion across an enter­prise.

With­out whole­sale sys­tems change, com­pa­nies risk get­ting stuck in a cycle of bolt­ing on new lay­ers of tech­nol­o­gy

And with the costs of upgrad­ing enter­prise-wide from one sys­tem to anoth­er all too fre­quent­ly exceed­ing €500,000 or even €1 mil­lion, this is not a small change for any busi­ness.

In fact, 91 per cent of senior insur­ance respon­dents to the sur­vey admit­ted that out-of-date IT sys­tems cre­at­ed inef­fi­cien­cies and costs that ulti­mate­ly the insured – that’s you and me – have to pay for.

Step-change for the industry

It’s clear the erad­i­ca­tion of the upgrade bur­den would con­sti­tute one of the biggest steps for­ward in insur­ance oper­a­tions. Upgrades are hold­ing insur­ers back from inno­vat­ing, but with­out whole­sale sys­tems change, com­pa­nies risk get­ting stuck in a cycle of bolt­ing on new lay­ers of tech­nol­o­gy, essen­tial­ly akin to rear­rang­ing the corn­flakes in a box of cere­al.

In con­trast, soft­ware as a ser­vice (SaaS) enables faster upgrades that pro­vide insur­ers with the lat­est fea­tures and func­tion­al­i­ty and pro­vides greater speed and agili­ty to meet evolv­ing cus­tomer needs.

But the SaaS mod­el goes way beyond sim­ply host­ing soft­ware in the cloud. By pro­vid­ing a set of ser­vices and sup­port, it enables a fun­da­men­tal­ly new approach to com­pet­ing in today’s econ­o­my, one where tech­nol­o­gy sup­ports strat­e­gy rather than dic­tat­ing it and insur­ers are empow­ered to focus on inno­va­tion in entire­ly new ways.

When com­bined with tech­nol­o­gy built on an open plat­form, which pro­vides access to pio­neer­ing insurtech part­ners in the broad­er ecosys­tem via appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming inter­faces (APIs), car­ri­ers can realise sig­nif­i­cant oper­a­tional effi­cien­cies.

An ecosys­tem is typ­i­cal­ly defined as an inter-rela­tion­ship of offer­ings in a com­mon mar­ket and our mis­sion at Duck Creek is to build the most dynam­ic and valu­able part­ner ecosys­tem for the insur­ance indus­try.

For instance, we’ve built pro­duc­tised inte­gra­tions to the most com­mon­ly used insur­ance data and ser­vices solu­tions, includ­ing geolo­ca­tion, MVR (motor vehi­cle records) lookups, vehi­cle data pre-fill, e‑signature and more.

We’re also con­tin­u­ous­ly adding new solu­tion part­ners. A good exam­ple is our rela­tion­ship with Cyto­ra, an ecosys­tem part­ner pow­ered by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, which enables our cus­tomers to access a wealth of infor­ma­tion about a com­mer­cial prop­er­ty with just a few key vari­ables, doing away with those seem­ing­ly end­less ques­tion sets nor­mal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with com­mer­cial prop­er­ty, while increas­ing accu­ra­cy too.

And anoth­er of our ecosys­tem part­ners, FRISS, dove­tails with Duck Creek in claims, pro­vid­ing fraud pre­ven­tion tech­nol­o­gy that is impact­ing direct­ly on com­bined ratios.

Designed for change

Our SaaS offer­ing, Duck Creek OnDe­mand, is built for insur­ance and designed for change. We pro­vide insur­ers with faster upgrades, end-to-end sup­port, pro­duc­tised third-par­ty inte­gra­tions, reduced imple­men­ta­tion time­lines and risk, high scal­a­bil­i­ty and per­for­mance opti­mi­sa­tion, plus advanced secu­ri­ty and pri­va­cy that paves a path for­ward to faster inno­va­tion.

The bub­ble of lay­er upon lay­er of lega­cy sys­tems that cur­rent­ly haunts the insur­ance busi­ness may make com­pa­nies feel safe because it main­tains the sta­tus quo, but it’s not safe. It’s very frag­ile. Bub­bles burst.

It’s time insur­ers assessed their tech­nol­o­gy risk with the same eye they use to assess the risks they under­write. SaaS rede­fines IT risk and the nature of safe­ty. Change is the new safe. Change is mod­ern. Be mod­ern.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it www.duckcreek.com