How cloud services can speed up the P&C industry

Cloud-based services can serve as a much-needed speed accelerator to the Canadian P&C insurance industry, eliminating friction and digitizing the customer experience, speakers said Thursday at the 2024 CIP Society Symposium in downtown Toronto.

“I personally think the biggest threat to innovation in an organization is the…legacy systems that they have to maintain, because it keeps them so busy,” says Sven Roehl, executive vice president of innovation at msg global and co-founder of Cookhouse Labs. “It’s something where you can really not say, ‘Okay, let’s do something well, quick.’”

Roehl was part of the Technology Round-up panel at the CIP Symposium, discussing new focus areas for insurance involving cloud-based platforms. The panel discussed a variety of tech topics, including how cloud technology is directly impacting and shaping the P&C industry.

Historically, insurers have had to deal with what are called “legacy systems.” Picture an insurer that has acquired other companies’ technologies through M&A growth and has had trouble integrating all of the acquired systems with their own. This presents complications in modernizing insurance company systems, which has taken a long time for insurers to change.

Roehl says change can sometimes take years to come into effect. Presenting a hypothetical example, he traced the evolution of thinking you might find in a P&C organization that has come up with an innovative idea, partnered with a start-up, and then wants to integrate the solution.

“‘We can start in the next six months,’” Roehl said as an example of early thinking. Then it becomes, “not under 12 months, because we still need to implement our claims and go through the transformation there.

“And then we’re going to talk about maybe mid-2025, we start implementation, which would probably take us a year because it’s very complicated.

“So, by the time you made the decision…to work with a start-up, [it] takes you almost three years to go live with that sometimes.”

On the other hand, bringing your insurance business into the cloud allows different points of access for different organizations. “So, it’s really a speed accelerator,” Roehl says. “I think cloud is also about standardization.”

Customer service improvement

For example, online shopping platforms like Shopify differentiate themselves on the customer service they deliver, which remains a problem in the industry. Roehl says even though he always hears insurers saying they are different from their competitors, “the policy is a policy and a claim is a claim.” So, cloud can enable more standardization across the industry and improve the customer experience.

Using cloud enables Aviva Canada to scale their solutions much faster than traditional on-premise environments, agrees Paul Beliavsky, the insurer’s vice president of technology delivery, data and finance.

While generative AI is all the rage these days, before it can be used properly, “we have to get our data straight,” Beliavsky says.

“And what I mean by that is, we have to understand it, break down the silos that naturally exist within data in our organization between lines of business, between departments, functions within the organization, so that that data becomes a valuable asset to the enterprise — that you can search it, period, and mine it really for insight and then run AI against it.”

Cloud services can be used to digitize the customer and claims experience, Beliavsky says. He uses the banking industry as an example, where data is already in the system and doesn’t need to be re-entered.

Cloud-based services could even personalize and digitize the claims experience by updating policyholders on the status of their claim. “The experience the customer gets when they’re at their low point truly matters,” Beliavsky says. “‘When am I going to get paid? When am I going to get restored back to where I was? When is the repair person going to come in and fix my house?’ I’ll probably get updates on that.”

Having traditional, on-premise servers used to be good enough, but “the reality is, that’s not your user base anymore — direct clients are your user base,” says panellist Greg Martin, chief technology officer at Cognition+.

“Eliminating that friction and…being able to have that access and do things straight through online, this is one thing that cloud really enables,” he says. “Cloud gives you that ability to have a significant improvement in performance for all stakeholders.”

Feature image by iStock.com/iambuff