This speed of change will only continue to accelerate as new technologies like artificial intelligence, IoT, and telematics become more deeply integrated into the insurance industry. But how can insurers deliver the omni-channel, digital-first experience today’s customers demand? The answer lies in connected insurance.
What is connected insurance?
Connected insurance leverages advanced technology and data sources like IoT to move beyond traditional insurance models to deliver a digital ecosystem that is all connected—including customers, insurers, agents, brokers, third-party vendors, and more.
While IoT and telematics initially started in personal and commercial auto insurance lines, over the past few years, we’ve seen them expand into other key coverage areas, including life and health, homeowners and renters insurance, and workers’ compensation.
In addition, a growing number of customers are open to sharing their data in exchange for reduced premiums. In fact, 69% of customers said they would share significant data on their health, exercise, and driving habits in exchange for lower prices from their insurers, compared with 58% two years ago. Furthermore, 66% of customers said they would share significant data for personalized services to prevent injury and loss, according to a report from Accenture.
DYK: 69% of customers said they would share significant data on their health, exercise, and driving habits in exchange for lower prices from their insurer.
What are the benefits of connected insurance?
Connected insurance empowers insurers to unlock the power of advanced data sources (including IoT, telematics, and more) and combine all that great data with all information and knowledge already stored in their core and legacy systems to deliver greater value across the entire insurance value chain. Right now, insurers have access to huge troves of data, but their legacy tech stacks and disparate, disconnected systems (think CRM, policy, claims, billing, accounting systems, etc.) often hold them back due to a lack of integrations and open APIs, resulting in siloed data and inefficiencies.
By creating a single engagement layer that unifies and extends this data to create a connected digital insurance ecosystem, insurers can turn raw data into actionable, valuable insights that enable them to deliver a more personalized, seamless insurance experience and eliminate previous inefficiencies and bottlenecks. The table below highlights just a few ways that connected insurance can help insurers reduce costs, increase profitability, and boost customer satisfaction.
Agent and Broker Channel Automation | Connected Underwriting | Connected Claims |
- Offer an omni-channel insurance experience that easily connects agents, brokers, customers, underwriters, and more. - Increase quote capacity and expedite the quote process, from submission to book. - Enable a 360-degree view of data from all sources, including legacy systems, IoT, and more. - Create custom offerings based on real-time customer data. | - Increase quote-to-bind ratio and improve submission handling by streamlining once siloed data and tasks. - Better manage and calculate risk and enable more intelligent connected underwriting by leveraging real-time data. - Automate selection of less risky clients using telematics and IoT. - Streamline manual, inefficient processes using IDP, AI, and automation. | - Improve your loss ratio by reducing claims cost and frequency. - Optimize claims management and increase straight-through processing by better monitoring risks and evaluating claims. - Gain a unified view of the customer, including claims and policy data across multiple systems. - Enhance fraud detection with real-time monitoring. |
Low-code and connected insurance.
To take advantage of the power of connected insurance, you need to have the right technology. That’s where low-code can help.
Low-code application development went mainstream in 2020—and it only continues to pick up speed. Forrester predicts that by 2021, 75% of development shops will use low-code platforms (up from just 44% in 2020).
Using a low-code automation platform, insurers can achieve the following benefits:
- Unify and extend your data. Source data from anywhere without needing to migrate it. Gain full visibility into the insurance life cycle and enable a 360-degree view with a dashboard that connects existing systems and data sources, including legacy core systems and new data sources like telematics, IoT, and more.
- Dramatically reduce time and cost to implement. Accelerate time from idea to implementation, and integrate siloed data into powerful apps, without coding or migrating data. Develop apps 17x faster and reduce development costs by 50%, and avoid the need to rip and replace core systems.
- Optimize the entire insurance life cycle with intelligent automation. Orchestrate people, technologies, and data in a single workflow. Automate complex processes end to end by leveraging low-code robotic process automation (RPA), AI, intelligent document processing, workflow, and case management to drive complete automation to enable a connected insurance experience.
- Remain agile and future-proof your operations. Adapt technology and solutions at speed. Whether it is changing business processes and rules or integrating with new data sources, low-code automation platforms help you remain agile and can be adjusted quickly as customer and market needs evolve.
Want to learn more about connected insurance?
Appian will be at Insurtech Insights Europe 15-16 March in London. Stop by booth #42 to learn more or attend our keynote session, “Unlocking the Power of Connected Insurance” on 16 March.
We hope to see you there!
