Improving customer experience is the greatest challenge facing the life insurance industry. Social media, the pandemic, technological innovations and e-commerce giants have pushed what it means to deliver fast and customized services that match consumer needs. Life insurers are working to meet these expectations and compete with new market entrants, but legacy technologies create barriers to innovation—including system incompatibilities that slow time-to-market.
To address these issues, many life insurance companies are implementing low-code applications.
Low-code is an approach to software development that allows any employee to put together software applications to fulfill business needs. It requires a minimal amount of coding knowledge, which makes it easier for non-IT staff to solve business issues and create better experiences.
Key reasons life insurers are embracing the low-code approach
- They don’t have to rely on the vendor for changes
Low-code enables an insurer to configure the solution rapidly to bring products to market without the vendor having to change the underlying source code. This approach requires fewer resources, while increasing flexibility and responsiveness to changing conditions because new apps can be brought to market faster.
- Many pre-packaged, static applications from outside vendors can’t be customized to meet organizational needs
Life insurers often rely on third-party vendors to address issues, given the limited bandwidth of internal IT departments. While these vendors might have a solution, they don’t always have the solution to solving the business problem in the exact way the company requires.
This issue is particularly acute in the insurance industry, because most companies have a host of specific business processes that are unique to their organization. Generic vendor solutions are also often difficult to configure or customize in response to changing business requirements. Low-code applications give a life insurer greater flexibility and make them more responsive to changing regulations, market conditions or competitive pressures.
- Low-code enables life insurers to more easily implement improvements to core systems after initial procurement
It is no secret that the insurance industry is hampered by a proliferation of tedious and repetitive manual processes carried out on idiosyncratic, company-specific systems. This makes insurers a rich source of low-code use cases.
For example, no two insurers record and store information in the same way. Often, generalized vendor solutions need to create patches or workarounds in order for business processes to work. These types of jury-rigged solutions introduce the risk that data needed for important functions like underwriting decisions or audits could be lost. With a low-code platform, life insurers can easily customize, collect and store crucial information in the correct format without risk.
See also: Breathing Life Into Life Insurance
Wrap-up
Off-the-shelf technology packages rarely produce exactly what an organization needs; with low-code, businesses can more easily configure solutions to their unique needs. Low-code extends the life of core IT technology by enabling easier modification of components to enhance user experience and streamline processes.
