Innovation the key to insurance evolution

Innovation is a fact of life in the insurance market and insurers need to adapt to it if they want to continue to do business.

That was the consensus of a panel of industry experts at the Intelligent Automation event in London today (Tuesday May 21) during a lively debate.

During the session, called ‘Embed Analytics Into The Heart Of Your Organisation’ sponsored by Willis Towers Watson, the panel agreed automation can help clients get value from analytics and help them understand the data that they are faced with on "an everyday basis".

Alexandrina Scorbureanu, group head of projects & overarching activities at Ergo Group, said it was crucial for companies to change their internal mindsets or at least adjust them to be able to deal with large amounts of data. Automation can increase efficiency and augment capacity, she said.

Fellow panelist David Melvin, director at Eudoxos UK, added that the insurance world is changing and companies need to adapt in order to cope. If they don’t change they will be left behind at the very least, he said. While Alina Jipa, transformation and change manager at RSA, stressed that innovation is a fact of life for the insurance market, something fellow speaker Iain Whittingham, senior director, insurance consulting and technology at Willis Towers Watson, agreed with.

The panel said that the right cultural mindset is a key factor for successfully embedding analytics. Insurers have a choice – manage the client or differentiate. They also agreed that another data revolution is occurring.

Panel members stressed that companies need to reassure employees that while change is coming/happening – reskilling will occur, rather than mass redundancies, as automation comes in. Instead of shedding staff, companies will still need the same amount of people, they’ll just be doing different things, such as data analytics.

Asked how companies can start to address the issue of introducing automation, the panel said that it was important to work out which business problems they want to deal with. For example, a major issue many face is how to process unstructured data so it can be analysed.

Once the business problems have been nailed down, speakers said it was important to implement change management, explain the problems to staff and put a solution in place that it not just a top-down view, but one that covers the entire company.

The session was moderated by David Clamp managing director at Merlin Digital Consulting.