Why give an answer when you can create a solution: Dogo Singh

I have been in workshops, forums, conferences where insurance gurus beam with delightful ideas about how they can transform the insurance market using technology, the million dollar question in my mind is always “How fast can we adopt?” don’t get me wrong they are some trail blazers who are trying but is trying enough ?

I have also heard a lot of people who think the only word that defines innovation is technology and again I beg to differ my thoughts are innovation can be a process, a product, a system and anything that improves the efficiency, access, affordability and quality of any idea or products and services.

The insurance of the future will be driven by innovation, a more responsive easy to access service tech or FinTech solution will be an enablement for this to happen, an idea of when we develop systems it should look at the universal need of the client and offer a one stop solution. These products should be an opt Out rather than Opt in, meaning umbrella products that address the needs of the clients where a client can decide to Opt out of the solutions rather than opt in.

A survey by Screen Nation indicated that 78% of clients mostly don’t know what they want until they are offered a solution, Africa needs to invest in research and development to give clients what they need every time, by harnessing data use and innovation it will be easy to predict what the client of the future will want and how they will want it.

In my personal experience as an insurer and risk enterprise specialist I have seen lives being transformed using insurance. It’s a fact, accidents happen whether we like it or not the question is how best do we mitigate and reduce the adverse effects.

I have seen businesses being empowered because of insurance where billions are paid out to ensure business continuity .So why is insurance an afterthought when an event has occurred? In my former life while I was working for a global logistics company they made it a priority for all members to appreciate Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) the appreciation of risks associated with our surrounding enabled us to pick out risks and immediately self-correct and come up with plans to mitigate them both at work, home and public spaces, key to note is- awareness, awareness, awareness just like a wood cutter for you to get better result you have to sharpen the axe again and again.

As a continent most families are struggling with quality medical care and this is a global issue-access to immediate, quality medical care and medication is a priority but most governments don’t have a national medical scheme to supplement on the medical insurance may be its high time that the stakeholders find a way to supplement each other and offer a value proposition to the population this will increase the appreciation of insurance, I stand to be corrected because some people do not believe in this solution

If it was my will every citizen in Uganda should atleast consume one product of insurance, so if we are to crack the code on the insurance tech adaptability and innovation we need to address the question of when and how fast?

While some insurance carriers have made significant modifications courtesy of disruptive digitization most companies trail behind. And the chasm between modern Insurtech agencies and traditional ones is deepening.

In 2016, globally insurers spent nearly $187.3 billion on IT, accounting for 25.7 percent of the whole global financial services spending. The total, nevertheless, is still quite low with legacy system complexity only slowing innovation. 

 According to McKinsey nine out of ten insurance companies identified legacy software and infrastructure as barriers for digitization, so companies spend millions of dollars on new software and the implementation and up take is in negative, technically the problem is within the insurance companies and not the technology. The other side of the problem is inbound correspondence and documentation. Every day all financial institutions process and gather thousands of files in paper archives. That’s not the best way to store, process, and exchange information. It doesn’t contribute to saving the environment either.

If files are digitized, analyzed, and stored in a cloud, documents can be automatically reviewed and rejected in the case of inconsistent information or errors, which allows insurance staff to deal only with consistent and correct information.

The customer data that has been collecting dust in paper archives for decades is no longer an expenditure item in a profit-and-loss statement. If you apply image and text recognition algorithms, these become valuable assets that tell an insightful story about your customers.

Spending doesn’t mean adoption Mike de Waal, president of Global IQX says:

“Modernization of core legacy systems, new insurance exchanges and changing business models (platform and peer-to-peer) defined the year. They will continue to do so as carriers adopt digital strategies… Juggling the onslaught of new innovation and understanding how it can be used to create a competitive edge–very quickly–can be disconcerting. However, these disruptive forces should be seen as the catalyst necessary for the kind of dramatic change required to spur growth and new insurance products.”

Vertical players look for a short pass to the digital age. Some companies make internal changes by backing insurtech startups or establishing innovative labs, while the rest are only hesitating.

Ideal path of innovate or die has been followed people are opening arms to innovation but still are slow on adoption.

The transformation of getting young people to work for insurance firm can be the easiest way to adopt to technology, the industrial psychologist appreciate that the millennial are adoptive, inquisitive, questions authority, and spend a lot of time online so the future customer of insurance is online yet insurers are off line, These digital natives will make it easy for insurance companies to appreciate the insurance tech innovation thus the need to be deliberate on these issues.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication as they say, Keep it Simple and Stupid insurance is an old sector to some people these is a mine field, if you are to get a policy and try to interpret it one can get lost in translation.it is then the responsibility of a learning insurance organization to find a way to simplify these complicated insurance jargons for consumers so that insurance can be appreciated.

Outsider attitude, let’s just say the people doing insurance believe they know it all when it comes to risk evaluation, mitigation, etc So how do we entrench adoption?

By allowing disruption to occur when UBER disrupted the transport sector it was an outsider who did it because he wasn’t happy with the status quo