DIG IN Preview: Masterclass Q&A with Ellen Carney
Complimentary access to top ideas and insights — curated by our editors.
At Digital Insurance, and especially at DIGIN, our goal is to give our readers and delegates the tools they need to succeed in a rapidly changing business environment.
That’s why we’re launching new Masterclasses this year curated exclusively for carriers: These three-part educational courses begin with two virtual classes and culminate with an in-person session at DIGIN on June 5 in San Francisco. Our goal with the Masterclasses is to elevate the expectations – and outputs – of learning and education around digital transformation in insurance. With three Masterclasses to choose from, delegates can identify and participate in the opportunity best tuned to their particular duties and charges at their insurance carrier.
If you’re still on the fence, editor in chief Nathan Golia chatted with Forrester’s Ellen Carney, who is the Masterclass instructor for the Building Your Tech Stack Strategy class. The three sessions for this course are Understanding Your Tech Stack Upgrade, Assessing Your Tech Stack Costs and Evaluating Risk and Potential Threats, and Implementing Your Tech Stack for Customer Satisfaction, Retention and Growth. Here’s what she’s looking to accomplish with the Masterclass initiative.
Digital Insurance: What makes the tech stack – the blocking and tackling of digital, so to speak – important to understand:
Ellen Carney: What’s becoming more important in the tech stacks is a way that we can configure and change and adapt the technology to our businesses. Things like API’s, low code/no code, and of course the cloud – you almost never hear of anybody doing anything that’s not in the cloud, at this point.
This is going to have some interesting implications on the role of the CIO. The job skills are going to change. We’re going to have this more standardized sense of how technology may be delivered to us and our customers and our partners, and what are some of the ways that we’re gonna have to differentiate our business offerings on the platform – so to speak, because that’s going to be a little more fluid and dynamic than concrete.
Digital Insurance: For years, “insurance technology” as a beat revolved around big enterprise software deployments. How has digital transformation and the entrants to the value chain changed that?
Ellen Carney: It changes to be less important that you’re a company “X” shop, and it’s much more important that you’ve extended the value of company “X’s” offering and used it as a foundational piece. With those new capabilities, we’re going to be able to configure or code ourselves, or go out into the marketplace, and shop for an API that’s going to connect to some really cool technology or cool system or cool vendor. That’s going to be the point of differentiation.
Digital Insurance: How is product strategy influencing the kinds of platforms insurers need to build on?
Ellen Carney: We have other distribution models that we’re imagining now. This whole idea of embedded insurance, I think traditional insurance carriers are underestimating the impact that embedded is going to have on their brands, on their marketing, and on their customer experiences – especially around the claim. When a customer needs service, they’re introduced to this brand that was not the company that sold them the coverage. What’s that experience gonna be like? How are you going to be able to replicate the simplicity and the ease of perhaps what you would hope that would have come from a retailer or an auto manufacturer or retail petroleum or whoever happens to be that’s now embedding car insurance?
You still need claims, you still need billing, you’re definitely still going to need policy admin. But the way we’re going to make it a better customer experience – more unique, simpler, easier, and more empathetic – is going to come from what we do ourselves to it.
Digital Insurance: How do you see your Masterclass as being able to help insurance tech leaders understand the landscape of possibilities?
Ellen Carney: Well, it’s this idea of the “platform of platforms” that can be enhanced to function as a core system. We just have more options now. And it can be helpful for everybody to understand that there’s a textbook perspective – “this would be a traditional route that you could go.” But there are these other things that you could do. And I think that’s what our class is going to get to.
To learn more about DIGIN and each Masterclass course, click here. Don’t miss your opportunity to join hundreds of insurance innovators in June. Register today.
