On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Annap Derebail, IBM’s Global Insurance Industry CTO within IBM’S Global Business Services Unit. Annap’S FOCUS has always been on delivering impactful business outcomes by re-imagining user experiences. Today Annap provides trusted advice to influence revenue growth for IBM’s clients by considering architectural leadership to transform client’s business through technology innovation. In this conversation they cover the future of insurance and implications on operations, how technology becomes a key enabler of growth today, and how can insurers simplify operations to build resilient business models.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• There’s a lot of market forces that are disrupting traditional insurance models. Firstly, around customer expectations. Customers are increasingly looking towards an Amazon- or Google-like experience when dealing with their insurance. The implications for insurers include creating some sort of personalised offerings, providing high levels of service and responsiveness.
• There are two key advantages that incumbent insurers have over new entrants to the market. Certainly, the new entrants are creating new business models and ways of attracting and approaching customers. But I think the advantages for incumbents are their huge existing customer base – keeping a customer is six times easier than acquiring a new one. Secondly, by virtue of having been in business for such a long time, they are sitting on tons and tons of data, they have knowledge of customer transactions/interactions. That’s a rich oasis with which they can develop a better understanding of their customers and what they need.
• Insurers really need to reinvent how they think about risk and what sort of a relationship they want with their customers. Reinventing that risk partnership and helping insurers with new risk experiences that offer personalised advise and demonstrating a new risk partnership between the insurer and the customer. Being able to harvest the data can be done by taking a fresh look at historically operating processes in the enterprise, critical processes such as underwriting claims, but also all of the support processes like billing, customer support, policy maintenance, etc. Just by paying attention to driving intelligence into those processes using data, we’ve been able to example reduce 15% of our customer churn by implementing a churn detection model.
• At the infrastructure level, what I see is a lot of incumbent insurers still operating legacy IT systems still working on legacy infrastructure. The immediate opportunity there is to migrate those onto a cloud-based platform. This brings inherent benefits like flexibility in terms of scaling up and down in response to demand and to market needs. You can access cloud-based services from anywhere in the world.

BEST MOMENTS

‘The insurance industry needs to adapt and respond to new disruptors and this response has to be driven by data and new technologies and using them to gain a business advantage in the market.’
‘Less than 10% of insurers have actually been able to meet what we call ‘the data dividend’, effective use of data in order to achieve competitive advantage because of a lack of knowledge of how to access data, how the data is siloed within the infrastructure of the business.’
‘We can help drive a step change in core productivity of incumbent insurers. About 60% of their costs goes into legacy IT systems, modernising by having multiple core systems in place and moving to a SaaS model reduces issues.’
‘The typical underwriting or claims process tends to have heavy human involvement and requires a large number of steps in order to make decisions. The scope there is to effectively use the mountain of data that insurers are sitting on to present the right data to the right decision makers at the right time – not just raw data, but insights drawn from the raw data. – to improve the process and categorise incoming cases that can either be automated or needs human intervention.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Annap Derebail has 20+ years of professional experience in systems and integration architecture, design, development and management of complex industry solutions. In his current role, he works with insurance customers worldwide to create innovative solutions for business problems leveraging microservices and API driven architecture, distributed, multi-tier systems and application integration architecture, AI/ML, blockchain, IoT, cloud computing and services-oriented architecture.

In the last five years, he has worked with worldwide financial services clients to provide trusted advice on their digital transformation initiatives, while serving as leader of the global IBM insurance industry architect community. His work with clients has spanned several application areas: Modernization architectures for insurance and banking, Blockchain applications in insurance, Enterprise architecture for aircraft systems health, Supply chain collaboration in automotive and retail, RFID based track and trace solutions, Product design-to-manufacture integration, and Supply chain optimization. Over the years, he has been IBM’s technical representative in industry standards bodies, including ACORD, BIAN, PDES Inc, STAR and AIA. He holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering/Operations Research from Texas A&M University.

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, and commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers and accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.

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