In today’s world of online instant gratification, customers demand quick returns for their interactions with a product or a service. The business of insurance is not excluded from this. Insurance does not sound like a very tech savvy business, but insurTechs and D2C businesses are anything but that. There is a growing trust in the market for internet and direct-tocustomer models powered by technology. Digital information sharing and excellent consumer experience have taken a centrestage in the overall value chain. While new age tech-first insurTechs are using disruptive technologies, traditional insurance companies are catching up by leveraging both emerging and established technologies. With a steady increase in awareness around insurance, there is an equally rising demand for products, services, and experiences that are tailor-made and personalised.
Public clouds and the ability to set up private secure cloud infrastructure has been around for a while, but the rate at which disruptive new cloud service offerings and their general availability have opened up an opportunity for innovation at a pace never seen before. Affordable, secure, scalable and internet enabled cloud storage solutions allow insurance companies to be data hungry and gobble up 360 degree consumer related data from different sources. Variety of data from click streams, from websites and mobile apps, financial, health, demography, social, payments, e-commerce etc, via consent enabled frameworks can be absorbed and stored at high volume and velocity. Elastic data processing and ML-as-services coupled with serverless compute and scalable container services allow creation of disruptive features like just in time risk scoring, ML based pricing, personalised plan recommendation, predictive risk coverage recommendation, fraud detection, document recognition and classification and similar data driven ones.
Predictive ML modeling, deployment of pre-trained models at scale allow disruptive experiences like behavior and usage based production curation and personalisation. Those who drive differently, or are more active, eat healthy, travel differently, or have a different financial spending prudence can be scored differently at the time when they are making buying or renewal decisions. Predictive models based on progression of the life events of the customers such as marriage, childbirth, job and role level changes, and the resultant change in their risk profile are creating the ability to proactively propose the customers, educate, nudge, guide and steer them to stay adequately insured at all times.
AI services are getting commoditised and adopted to enable auto transcribing, auto adjudication, video and telephonic medical underwriting, handwritten document recognition and content extraction, online proof of life verification etc. AI services are disruptively being adopted in making systems and applications secure by AI-enabled threat assessment, identification, monitoring, triaging and recently mitigation and auto-correction.
Auto adjudication with a zero manual intervention across the entire process chain of routing, checking, adjudicating, computing, and getting customer inputs until settlement is getting disrupted with services like content extraction, classification, elastic workflows, supervised ML models replacing traditional rules engine-based processing systems.
Infrastructure uptime, monitoring, and autocorrection using AI agents too are creating a disruptive impact on the overall operating paradigms, costs, and organisational structures. As an industry leader, our predictive auto eligibility and underwriting cloud platform power the differentiated customer experience by leveraging disruptive technologies.
The newest disruptive technology are the AI services based on the large language models or LLMs that insurers are evaluating and racing to adopt for product feature discovery, customer support automation, marketing, auto, and contextual prospecting, assisted selling, and explainability of product or service offerings like claims deductions or inclusions and exclusions conditions that previously were difficult to decipher in the fine print.
Consumption of digitally enabled services like product discovery, product comparisons, purchase, payments, policy management, claims, and servicing are getting disrupted by newer technologies like cross-mobile platform frameworks, and faster content cache technologies at the edges. The cost and pace of experimentation on user experience have been reduced challengingly via A/B frameworks, central identity and customer data platforms, event-based serverless compute units, and the ability to deploy pre-trained models and apply MLOps at scale.
The biggest disruption is not in the emergence of a single technology but in an ecosystem of SaaS-enabled individual disruptions in different fields. Today’s cloud ecosystem allows data to be created once and shared within a consent framework across different calling applications, thus eliminating the need for the customer to re-enter and validate their data every time across different products. The maturity in the ecosystem offering allied SaaS services like payments, eKYC, account aggregators, credit scoring, mapping, etc. creates an opportunity to service customers absolutely paperless thereby providing instant value in a seamless manner.
The engineering culture, SDLC processes, and tools have also drastically changed to support these disruptions with collaborative cloud-based development and source code management. Remotely and fully managed quality assured, pressure, performance, and security tested CI/CD automation.
Insurtechs today are at the forefront of creating as well as leveraging disruptive technologies to grow the D2C insurance industry and are paving the path to reimagine the way insurance is evolving in India.
Views expressed by: Harish Ramarao, Senior Vice President – Tech, ACKO General Insurance
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