The Accenture Technology Vision 2012 report for the insurance industry outlines opportunities for forward-thinking CIOs to position technology as a way to drive growth for their businesses, rather than only as a means to cut costs and improve efficiency.
As customer demands increase and insurance companies focus growth efforts on emerging markets, insurers will need to develop simple, focused products and improve the customer experience. As expectations regarding cost-to-income ratios mount and regulatory pressures intensify, insurers will also have to leverage low-cost channels and deploy proven, competitive underwriting strategies—all while using regulatory requirements as sources of competitive advantage rather than matters of compliance.
Accenture has identified six technology trends that will influence insurance over the next three to five years:
- Context-based services—Where you are and what you are doing will drive the next wave of digital services.
- Converging data architectures—Rebalancing the data architecture portfolio and blending the structured with the unstructured are key to turning data into new streams of value.
- Industrialized data services—The ability to share data will make it more valuable—but only if it is managed differently than in the past.
- Social-driven IT—Realize that social is not just a bolt-on marketing channel. It will have true business-wide impact.
- PaaS-enabled agility—The maturing platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market will shift the emphasis from cost-cutting to business innovation, supporting rapid evolution for business processes that need continual change.
- Orchestrated analytical security—Organizations will have to accept that their gates will be breached and begin preparing their second line of defense—data platforms—to mitigate the damage caused by attacks that get through.
This paper gives Accenture’s view of what will influence the choices of CIOs in the insurance sector.