The ongoing digital transformation has brought forth a new set of challenges for insurance companies, particularly in the context of effectively exploiting emerging channels for their services. In this article, we will explore these challenges and introduce the Open Insurance Hub, an innovative solution designed to revolutionize partner integration, streamline processes, and enhance overall efficiency within the insurance industry.
Current Landscape of the Insurance Sector: Challenges and Opportunities
The Insurance world is now omnichannel and the increasing use of digital channels is radically changing the landscape of the business as we know it. This shift is not merely a trend but a radical transformation, altering the way business has traditionally been conducted. Open Insurance and Embedded Insurance initiatives are today’s priorities for companies aiming to expand their reach. Within this context, rapid and efficient integrations with partners have emerged as critical elements for optimizing the advantages of such strategic approaches. Additionally, the ability to tailor product offerings to the diverse ecosystem of distributors is fundamental to ensure alignment with their specific business requirements. Lastly, streamlining processes and eliminating hindrances across the insurance value chain is essential to deliver a seamless experience to end-users.
To address these challenges, companies need to invest in technological solutions that have the potential to facilitate this transition. This revolves around three main domains.
- Companies should embrace automated methods for collaboration with partners, in order to reduce integration time and costs.
- It becomes essential to rely on cloud-native technologies, in particular on a composable and no-code approach to customize the offerings for distributors, releasing new products with a faster time-to-market.
- Effectively sharing data with all industry stakeholders becomes fundamental to removing redundant activities for each integration process.
This vision culminates in what is referred to as an Insurance-as-a-Service Platform that aims to enhance user experiences, minimize Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), facilitate self-service onboarding for partners, and ensure adaptability without altering core applications.
The Open Insurance Hub: A Revolutionary Solution for the Future of Insurance
At the heart of this vision lies the Open Insurance Hub – a tailor-made set of solutions designed to address specific needs and challenges in the insurance landscape. This new architectural paradigm empowers financial institutions and insurance companies in various ways, such as expanding product categories, enhancing customer centricity, and fostering new partnerships and distribution channels.
This modern architecture is comprised of three primary layers. Firstly, a data management layer based on the Data Fabric paradigm. The layer serves as a decoupling mechanism to aggregate data from core insurance systems and third-party providers, ensuring continuous data accessibility. This enables the consolidation of data into Single Views based on specific business requirements and real-time exposure through APIs. Within the Open Insurance Hub, several default Single Views are provided, such as the customer-centric view, encompassing comprehensive personal and portfolio information for each customer, the policy-centric view detailing policy basics, movements, titles, points of sale, and appendices, the claim-centric view, including essential claim details and involved individuals, adjuster information, and more.
Secondly, the composable insurance layer represents a pivotal component within this architecture. It provides organizations with a versatile framework, allowing them to craft, reuse, and enrich microservices that provide various functionalities and processes in the insurance domain. Furthermore, this layer extends its capabilities to potential frontend components, adding another dimension of flexibility and innovation. By facilitating the merger of these components, companies can craft tailored services finely tuned to meet the specific needs of their partners. This not only amplifies the scope of service offerings but also enhances collaboration and integration with partners, fostering a dynamic and responsive ecosystem within the insurance landscape.
Finally, the digital experience layer orchestrates the aggregation of information and functions from distinct domains, preparing them for access via final touchpoints. This involves exposing company data and services through APIs to both partners and internal channels. An instrumental asset in this context is the External API Portal or External Developer Portal, empowering self-service integration for crucial partners. This facilitation enables external entities to independently access and request the company’s products and services. Consequently, it centralizes the governance process, streamlining the development of a collaborative value proposition with industry partners.
Simplifying Bancassurance Integration with the Open Insurance Hub: A Use Case
The bancassurance business model refers to the sale of insurance products through banks or other financial institutions. This model aims to leverage banks’ existing customer relationships and distribution channels to offer insurance products, providing convenience and potential cost savings for customers and expanding revenue streams for all the actors involved. Nowadays, this distribution channel is experiencing a major transformation in terms of the use of digital channels to enable a seamless customer experience along the companies’ customer base. However, integrating these services can be challenging, often leading to long integration times and high costs.
In this context, the Open Insurance Hub empowers the development of standardized APIs tailored for policy management and quoting purposes. Extensive documentation accompanies these APIs, and they are made accessible through Mia-Platform External API Portal, simplifying integration for bancassurance. Moreover, Mia-Platform Back Office plays a vital role in configuring product packages for each channel, thereby boosting adaptability and personalization. Meanwhile, Mia-Platform Console takes charge of portfolio services, overseeing domain services that provide essential features for both products and policy lifecycle in a standardized manner. Lastly, with the aid of Mia-Platform Fast Data, data gathering and exposure are optimized, minimizing direct interactions with core systems and enhancing operational efficiency.
Transforming the Insurance Sector with the Open Insurance Hub
The insurance industry is at a turning point, where the convergence of digital technologies and insurance services necessitates a shift in operational paradigms. The Open Insurance Hub stands as a beacon of innovation, providing a transformative solution to the challenges faced by insurance companies in today’s scenario. By embracing this forward-thinking platform, financial institutions can truly revolutionize their operations and deliver customized and self-service experiences to their customers and partners.
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