How Insurers’ Quest for Digital Dominance Is Reshaping the Industry by Chris Blatchly, CDO & Consulting Leader for Insurance at Cognizant

Carriers are building a digital arsenal to combat the risks created by Black Swan events and stay ahead of customer demands in today’s hypercompetitive world reveals Chris Blatchly, Chief Digital Officer and Consulting Leader for Insurance at Cognizant.

For insurers, the pandemic turned risk into more of a rule than an exception, resulting in agility and responsiveness to Black Swan events becoming top priorities overnight. This meant insurers had to reduce processing times, anticipate customer needs and create personalized experiences in near real-time.

Not surprisingly, hyperconnectivity (IoT), automation and analytics have emerged as the key drivers of the future of work. Insurers are now in a digital arms race to catalyze revenue and growth. Even as machines take on more and more work, jobs are transforming at a rapid pace and ethical risks abound.

To understand how insurers are responding to rapid change, the Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work (CFoW), working with Oxford Economics, surveyed 4,000 C-level executives globally, including 285 senior insurance executives.

Five Digital Imperatives for Insurers

1. Build robust API-driven strategies. Use API layers to connect customers with partners from other industries; this will help insurers acquire new insights about their customers.
2. Reorganize for speed and agility. Insurers should lay a strong IT foundation and support it with new ways of collaboration and greater autonomy.
3. Reflow work across the business. Create teams with diverse expertise that can swarm around specific challenges and accelerate high-value projects.
4. Give teams a fresh perspective. Leaders should work with their HR to create teams that merge diverse backgrounds and skills to spark creativity and improve customer satisfaction.
5. Rethink jobs into tasks and roles. A workforce freed by automation can be deployed to understand customers better. Upskilling of workers through a skills academy could be a starting point.

For more, read our paper “The Work Ahead in Insurance: Vying for Digital Supremacy”.

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