For insurance companies, the pandemic was a wake-up call that highlighted a lack of preparedness for a rapid (and lasting) switch to a more digital world. It’s a switch that requires extensive agility and ability to react even quicker to changes than ever before.
It’s a need recognized by at least 48 out of 200 insurance executives surveyed by Deloitte’s Center for Financial Services, who stated that the pandemic “showed how unprepared our business was to weather this economic storm.”
As a result of the pandemic wake-up call, insurance companies need to focus more aggressively on transformative projects that will build long-term, innovative foundations that will support existing needs and future agility and growth. In fact, 95% of the executives surveyed by Deloitte are already accelerating or looking to speed up digital transformation to maintain resilience.
The insurance companies that do will have a golden opportunity, one that will basically be driven by analytics. Whether it’s greater customer intimacy, better operational excellence, more precise risk assessment, faster fraud detection, more complete compliance, or increase security, data and analytics are going to be the insurance industry’s rocket fuel for the next hundred years of their business journey.
The golden opportunity
With the right data and analytics, insurance companies can save and make millions by removing risk, building complete customer views, and reducing underwriting time. For example, the F.B.I. estimates that the total cost of insurance fraud (not including health insurance fraud) to be more than $40 billion per year. Profitability can be increased by speeding up data analysis and modeling capabilities. All of this will require a more complete, data-driven view of the customer journey and new ways to optimize it.
It will also require faster and easier ways to integrate and leverage existing, disparate systems to provide consistent and unified analytical capabilities across different lines of business. Insurance companies need to integrate systems and data sources that may reside on premises, in private clouds, public clouds, or multiple public clouds. And it all needs to be accomplished without ripping and replacing an insurance company’s existing infrastructure.
Real need for real time
But there’s also a critical need for real-time analytics. Today, too many insurance companies’ business analytics and decisions are hobbled by existing systems that take hours or days to run reports. Because of existing limitations, distributed data challenges, and simply slow processing, many types of critical business processes simply can’t be accomplished in real time, leaving business analysts and decisions to wait hours or days. To compete effectively, insurance companies must have real-time analytics that can process enormous volumes of data to provide real-time insights, real-time quoting, real-time reports, and more.
The power of a transparent Distributed Cloud
At the same time, strategies for a distributed cloud environment are growing more critical. One of the biggest challenges facing insurance companies, especially large ones is how to integrate, collect, and analyze data from across distributed systems quickly and easily. Too many insurance companies are faced with the situation where critical customer data or product data is locked up in silos, not easily accessible for deeper analysis.
To be successful going forward, insurance companies must move from a mindset where all their data is local and all processing and analytics are limited to individual systems to the mindset of the distributed cloud. They must build an analytical infrastructure that can easily and transparently integrate and use data from any point of a distributed cloud, in real time.
It’s now or never
For insurance companies, it’s a real “now or never” time to turbo-charge their digital transformations. The global Covid-19 pandemic has clearly changed the stakes when it comes to transforming tradition-bound processes and siloed-data sources from a liability to an asset. Today’s insurance challenges demand a modern data analytics platform that can handle any data scale or complexity, from terabytes of data to distributed clouds. But it needs to be delivered at a predictable price and without a massive investment in technology or new skill sets.
The answer to these insurance challenges is a solution like the Yellowbrick Data Warehouse. The Yellowbrick Data Warehouse is a fully-modern platform that offers the best price/performance and flexibility for data analytics that insurance companies can buy.
By using Yellowbrick, insurance companies now have a golden opportunity to unify their vast amounts of data to drive more complete customer views, faster business processes and analytics, more accurate risk models, new ways to integrate and use real-time data, and unified platform for a distributed cloud world.
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