“Insurtech.” It’s a buzzword that’s ricocheting across the insurance industry. But what does it really mean, and how can regulators and carriers leverage insurtech to support their goals and objectives?
Understanding Insurtech
To AAIS, insurtech simply refers to technological innovations being brought to the insurance industry. New tech capabilities in insurance are flooding the marketplace, touching every step in the insurance and customer service process. We see great value in insurtech that supports a critical tenet of the insurance customer experience…flexibility. Insurtech that understands the changing demands of customers and adds flexibility and customization will continue to differentiate.
At AAIS, it’s our job to create advisory products and solutions that can be integrated with these flexibility-driven technologies to build an end-to-end insurtech experience of value. We create our solutions carefully, working with our partners to really understand customer need, using Design Thinking methodology to build customer-focused, flexible and forward-thinking solutions.
Leveraging Design Thinking
Design Thinking is critical to our success. We used it to create our openIDL blockchain platform and believe it’s a cornerstone to our design process. Design Thinking is a five-step, empathy-driven process where we bring together stakeholders and knowledge owners across the insurance landscape to understand what a specific user is experiencing and how we're going to solve a defined problem. From there, we design a new experience – each interaction, detail and step. While process efficiency and cost containment are important and should be considered, Design Thinking helps us stay focused on the customer experience with a better, fuller understanding of their needs.
When we were developing openIDL, we engaged regulators and insurers, data and technology providers, to get a sense of their pain points. That customer-centric approach helped us understand how openIDL would fit into the insurtech landscape, and Design Thinking helped us create a much better platform.
The Future of Insurtech
Our vision for the future of P&C insurance is focused on leveraging insurtech to solve customer problems, simplifying each experience and working with empathy to support an evolving insurance ecosystem. Our investments in a modern infrastructure have resulted in a platform that supports machine learning, artificial intelligence and blockchain applications. At AAIS, we’re excited to partner with insurtech players across the industry to bring even more value to our Members.