It’s no great secret that there’s a lot of change going on – and not just in the insurance industry. The turbulence of the last few years has led insurers to become more creative in their approaches to IT modernization. Insurance is a saturated market and prices have been forced down by competition: most lines of insurance are no longer overly lucrative. The trick to both survival and success is to get costs down, to become more agile and also more transparent.
A platform that can help an insurer save money – and at the same time offer customers more agility – brings huge benefits to companies struggling under the weight of ageing, incompatible IT landscapes. This is a trend we’ve seen in most other sectors, and SAP can now offer the same benefits to insurance as it does to many other industries: insurers will be able to integrate, and transform their businesses one step at a time.
Not only can we now offer an end-to-end solution in the US market – including auto-ISO updates – we can also separate policy admin from product management. This might not seem like much at first, but what it means is significant. If you have an old policy system, we can modernize it with a new front end, providing new product agility while leveraging your existing system. There’s no need for open-heart surgery.
“Legacy modernization” has finally become a reality, and it allows us to modernize bit by bit without jeopardizing the whole. Also it allows CIOs to act with confidence. Add the speed of HANA, plus our analytics capabilities and insurers are able to go to market faster, with immediate benefits and low costs, in increments with which they are comfortable.
At SAP, we don’t really make a habit of acquisition. It tends to be focused on particular technologies. But insurance is such a promising market that the synergy of the Camilion acquisition made total sense. In such a hugely fragmented market, there is plenty of opportunity to help insurers in coming years – and for companies to really feel the benefits in a measurable ways.
We are beginning to see a new wave of customers approaching insurance IT in a new way. This is especially true in many emerging markets where insurers are leapfrogging generations of technology into the newest platforms. Stay tuned...
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