The innovation paradox: more technology, same challenges

Over the last few years, the insurance industry has embraced an extraordinary number of tech innovations: digitalization, cloud, APIs, data and advanced analytics, automation, digital distribution, and now artificial intelligence.

The list keeps growing.

And yet, despite this abundance of innovations, many insurers still struggle to increase speed, simplify operations and grow at scale.

Why? Because these have too often been approached as a series of separate initiatives, rather than as a transformation of the underlying technology and operating model.

AI becomes an AI project. Digital distribution becomes a channel project. Customer experience becomes a marketing initiative. International expansion becomes an IT program.

Each investment makes sense on its own, but the real challenge is making them work as one, connecting innovations into a coherent transformation and continuous evolution program.

So what enables insurers to make all these capabilities work together?

That’s where the role of a core insurance platform changes the game: a core platform is meant to provide stability, reliability and operational control, and those expectations haven’t disappeared.

Today Insurers expect core platforms to do more than run the business reliably, to evolve continuously while enabling innovation around them, to become the environment where innovation can connect, scale and drive business value.

Artificial Intelligence doesn’t create value in isolation, and neither does digital distribution, nor product innovation or any other capability. Their impact depends on how effectively they integrate with underwriting, policy administration, claims, customer interactions and business operations.

In other words, innovation is measured by how seamlessly those capabilities work together.

That’s what “Beyond the Core” means: expanding the traditional role of a core insurance system, from a system of record and policy administration engine into a platform for continuous evolution.

This is the nexus of the conversations we will bring to RGI Next 26, where customers and partners will discuss how insurance platforms are evolving  and what that evolution makes possible.