Insurance

The Digital Imperative for Midsize P&C Carriers

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Author(s)

Tim Auger

Practice Lead, UK and Europe, Client Services, Insurance

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Key Points

Digital transformation has never been more critical for midsize Property and Casualty (P&C) carriers, especially with large insurers and agile entrants intensifying their digitalization efforts.
From achieving customer-centricity to being future-ready with innovative and next-generation services, the impact of digital transformation can be pervasive for midsize P&C companies.
Notably, digital platforms can help companies achieve important outcomes – cost savings, customer experience improvement and risk mitigation – within the initial few months of implementation.

Today, digital transformation is vital for Property and Casualty (P&C) insurers of all sizes to unlock growth and profitability. According to a WNS and Corinium Intelligence survey, more than 50 percent of leading global insurers have already digitized client-facing business processes. They have leverage compared to most midsize carriers that are less advanced on the digital maturity curve or slow to adopt.

Simultaneously, InsurTechs and digital entrants continue to disrupt the market further. A report from re-insurance broker Gallagher Re shows that 2021 was a record year for InsurTech investments. Specific to P&C, the InsurTech space recorded investments worth USD 1.49 Billion in the second quarter of 2022 alone.¹

It is, therefore, imperative for midsize carriers to embrace enterprise-wide digital transformation. While navigating internal barriers, they must collaborate with digital partners to drive a seamless and scalable change.

Driving Customer-centricity

Agile partners, backed by comprehensive solutions and platforms, can help midsize carriers place customers at the heart of their digital transformation efforts.

Digitalization can help insurers meet the customer demand for speed and convenience. By harnessing tools such as conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI), companies can deliver round-the-clock customer service while limiting human intervention to complex and exceptional cases. Notably, AI-powered tools and techniques can empower employees with real-time insights (generated from these interactions), enhancing decision-making and creating hyper-personalization opportunities.

For customers, this translates into a unified digital experience. The application of intelligent CX solutions enabled a leading insurance company to offer an integrated digital experience to more than 70,000 customers and improve customer satisfaction scores by 45 percent.

Serving as the Backbone for Innovation and Next-generation Services

Beyond customer experience, digital transformation will help midsize carriers unleash innovative services in the P&C market over the next decade. The growing availability of data is facilitating this.

IDC predicts that there could be almost 56 billion connected devices by 2025, producing 79.4 zettabytes of data². Thus, insurers have numerous opportunities to create experiences that disrupt and redefine the industry. This is particularly true for midsize carriers that can tap into this gold mine of potential insights.

Companies are already harnessing AI to supplement and enhance the value of brokers, digitizing laborious and repetitive processes with Machine Learning (ML)-led cognitive solutions. They strive for zero paperwork and a “seamless experience.”

Motor insurers are applying real-time data and insights to reward customers for safe driving. Meanwhile, others are developing processes to proactively disseminate weather warnings to customers, enabling them to minimize risk.

Leveraging End-to-End Solutions for Immediate Value Realization

The power of platforms underscores why midsize carriers should invest more in leading industry solutions to digitize. These dynamic platforms, wrapped in an agile ecosystem, can help businesses design and implement processes and speed up transformation across all functions.

Ecosystem is the operative word here. Third-party solutions can provide an entire digital package customized to specific business needs. They cater to the fundamental enterprise need for enhanced scalability, improved speed-to-market, and real-time insights.

For midsize carriers, this translates into efficiencies realized within the first few months of implementation. The immediate gains – significant savings, reduced risk, and improved customer experiences – more than offset the costs associated with digital transformation.

Automation is a case in point. According to research from McKinsey & Company, automation can cut the cost of a claims journey by 30 percent.³ Companies can implement Straight-through Processing (STP) to slash operating costs while accelerating the end-to-end claims process and reducing leakage. Leading platforms can establish the liability for approximately 70 percent of motor claims at the First Notice of Loss (FNOL) stage.

While reducing costs, these end-to-end solutions can also help radically minimize risk. The underlying AI and ML models can enable the effective management of third-party exposures. The operational scale of midsize carriers is also advantageous, with fewer legacy issues to overturn and lesser enterprise data to integrate.

From Collectors to Protectors

Increasingly, digital-led innovation is helping enterprises cater to consumers beyond traditional insurance boundaries. It represents a new era for P&C insurance, and midsize carriers must take advantage of this opportunity.

Digital transformation enables real-time insights required to influence behaviors successfully. This will allow insurers to evolve from collectors to protectors.

To know about how WNS is helping midsize P&C carriers pivot to digital-first insurance, visit Insurance Business Process Outsourcing | P&C Insurance Solutions | Insurance Digital Transformation