Welcome to the Insurance Matrix

Insurers’ business strategies and technology strategies are becoming intertwined to the point that there can really be no separation between the two. As a result of COVID-19, insurers, Managing Agents, brokers, loss adjusters and the underwriting ecosystem across the planet are being forced to make rapid digital transformations, which will accelerate their strategic roadmaps.

Such a fast transformation, as well the influx of new technologies is shaping a new era for the insurance business. In this environment, architecture is becoming more vital, as insurer competition turns into a fight between technology stacks.

Insurers and their business partners such as DOCOsoft, are being confronted by more technology choices than before. A Head of Claims will have to consider cloud deployments, which types of AI models to use and the broadening range of edge devices, extending all the way to the design of hardware and computation. Quantum computing could even be the next step literally expanding each layer of the insurance and risk stack into new dimensions. Insurance as a service solution, improvement in claims technology standards and the deepening of the industry’s cloud foundation will help to provide greater access to customers.

So called “digital twins’’ are proliferating at a faster rate than Mr Smith in the Matrix, as greater connectivity threatens to take us to a new – and, some say, irreversible inflection point. This would be the birth of the mirrored world, to coin a phrase from the consultant Accenture.

As Accenture notes: “When digital twins were initially adopted, they were championed for their ability to monitor, simulate and streamline the data of different devices. But recently, the scale of the models, layering in of AI and increase in adoption has transformed the equation. Leaders are starting to connect massive networks of intelligent twins, linking many twins together to create living models of whole factories, product life cycles, supply chains, ports and cities. They are creating unbroken threads of data—fabrics that will soon be essential to every enterprise’s digital strategy.”

How can intelligent twins help insurers to reach this digital nirvana? Well, the foundations will need to be laid in such a way that integrated, trusted insights, delivered by intelligent twins and mirrored environments help detect and predict anomalies, while pivoting to risk manage unplanned downtime. For a claims manager this might be about helping them to enable greater autonomy.

From an agile perspective, this would require a focus on helping a claims to team to adjust designs and strategies with new data they collect or new tests that they run – but helping them to achieve this ambition in a more dynamic and integrated way.

The supercomputer memory storage that took up a whole room in the 1950s can now easily fit into a smart phone. It surely can’t be too long before a smart phone becomes capable of sending Elon Musk on a new adventure to Mars! The fact is, however, that we are currently experiencing a move toward democratized technology. The average person in EC3 has access to impressive technology capabilities, without requiring highly specialized skills, that would have given them almost godlike powers in the eyes of an individual born even a few hundred years ago.

In our next blog, we will explore the limits of the possible in ClaimsTech.

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