Top-10 Technologies Seen Most Likely To Have Big Impact On P&C Insurance

Property and casualty insurers must innovate to stay relevant to customers, improve profitability and transition into a business model that can shift with future market changes. To do that, insurers must face legacy-system challenges and adopt emerging technologies to support niche business processes.

Transformational technologies are at your disposal, so the issue then becomes one of prioritizing investments and building a business case for new technology use.

To help guide chief information officers in technology evaluation, Gartner generates annual “Hype Cycles” that profile emerging and new technologies to show the level of maturity, adoption rates and business value of each. This research helps further analyze those technologies, identifying the ones that will have the biggest impact on the p&c industry over the next five years.

These technologies will be “game changing.” They will challenge existing business processes, support the emergence of new business models and allow companies to successfully differentiate to drive revenue growth.

Determination of these technologies is based on Gartner observations and discussions with clients globally.

There is a long list of emerging technologies that p&c insurers can use to improve their processes—from product development through customer service. Many of these technologies, however, provide only incremental or minor improvements, have limited-to-no return on investment, or do not have the promise to help p&c insurers radically change their business models, reduce operational costs or generate revenue.

With budgets challenged, and with limited funding for discretionary spending, it is imperative that organizations prioritize their investments to those that will generate the greatest ROI and drive the most value.

Based on Gartner's review of the p&c insurance sector, software market, client priorities and past Gartner studies, the top-10 technologies with the greatest impact for p&c insurance have been identified.

Note that some are more applicable to personal lines because much of the industry change projected during the next five years is a result of evolving technology use among consumer groups.

The following are what we believe will be the top-10 technologies for p&c insurance, although not in any particular order. The importance of each technology depends on your individual needs and market niche:

• Modern Policy and Claims Management Systems:

There have been significant improvements in the software market during the past six-to-seven years.

Vendors have developed modern policy and claims management systems that are componentized (sold independently, rather than in a suite), offering enhanced workflow and business process management capabilities, with rules separate from the source code for easy configuration, supporting industry standards (for example, ACORD Standards), and built on newer technology platforms.

The adoption of these systems by personal and commercial p&c insurers can provide significant value, including reduced total cost of ownership when legacy systems are decommissioned, faster rules and workflow changes, easier integration with surrounding systems, reduced challenges with staffing to support old technologies and programming languages, and improved long-term maintenance.

• Web Services and SOA Tools:

Insurers operate a large ecosystem of systems and applications that integrate for seamless processing. In the past, companies had to hard-code integration between systems, which was costly and time-consuming, created challenges when applications were replaced and integration had to be redone, and often was difficult overall due to technology incompatibility.

The use of Web services/service-oriented architecture enables companies to deploy services instead of using one-to-one integration, and will help insurers improve their straight-through processing capabilities and reduce integration costs.

more information :-http://www.property-casualty.com/Issues/2010/June-7-2010/Pages/Top10-Technologies-Seen-Most-Likely-To-Have-Big-Impact-On-PC-Insurance.aspx