The insurance industry today is in the midst of digital advancement. Insurtech has grabbed our imagination with automation, predictive analysis and wide scale use cases.
Predictions of insurance 10 years from now will certainly be fueled by insurtech, now in its infancy. But what exactly is insurtech?
WaterStreet Company empowers insurers to leverage next-generation technology for rapid growth and greater market share.
What Does Insurtech Mean?
Insurtech is a branch of technology that integrates with or replaces existing insurance solutions. Across all insurance industries, from health insurance to life insurance and auto insurance to pet insurance, technology is helping insurers grow in unprecedented ways. Insurtech has exploded into a vast ecosystem of solutions, all competing to deliver next-generation insight for insurers.
Insurtech is the abbreviation of insurance technology, similar to the abbreviation of fintech for financial services technology. Much like fintech revolutionized the banking industry in the early 2000s, insurtech follows a similar evolution, now maturing in the 2020s.
What does insurtech do?
Insurtech expands the abilities of carriers and insurance agents with greater data capabilities. Insurance solutions were once siloed, limiting businesses to only work with data collected by the company. Many of these solutions were also limited by intranet connections and difficult to share between departments, limiting how the company could bring data together across areas of the business, and resulting in an enormous manual effort behind routine report generation.
Today’s insurance solutions are excellent at connecting insurance carrier systems to both inside data and outside data. Cloud platforms, such as WaterStreet Company’s Business Intelligence Suite, store data within a data lake, serving as the insurer’s “reservoir” for Big Data. Rather than storing the company’s data across disparate systems, all data is saved under one umbrella and then processed through Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) to integrate this data into one digestible user-friendly solution. Business Intelligence tools animate the company’s data with narrative visuals for enhanced discussions among business leaders.
This method of managing a company’s Big Data prevents silos of data, strengthening access to shared information across departments, and accelerates report generation for improved insight and profitability. As more companies adopt flexible and scalable cloud platforms, creativity has grown amongst insurance experts and new technologies have emerged.
Insurtech is made possible by these new data management practices. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are built into many cloud insurance solutions, such as WaterStreet’s, allowing insurance companies to not only draw from a history of internal data with rapid, visual analytics, but to also allow integration with outside data for greater market insight and context into the company’s internal data.
As the insurer discovers opportunities to grow, the insurer’s core system has the ability to connect to third-party integrations. It’s essential for insurers to adopt a cloud-based core system in order to prepare for flexible integrations and a wider ecosystem of data.
What is the primary goal of insurtech?
The primary goal of insurtech is to accelerate the speed of the insurer’s business. These goals may include:
- Faster product launches
- Enhanced administrative efficiency
- Data insights beyond the carrier’s current capabilities
- Providing next-generation customer service for policyholders
Depending on the carrier’s pain points, there are a wide variety of insurtech solutions materializing across insurance markets to help carriers achieve greater market share.
What are examples of insurtech products?
Depending on the insurance market, there are hundreds of examples of insurtech solutions today. Many solutions are making the most of advances in data analytics, combining Artificial Intelligence, geolocation data, and Internet of Things data.
Some solutions are focused on adopting hardware and sensor data, such as testing the possibilities of drones to accelerate assessments of property value and property damage. Another great advancement into hardware-focused insurtech is to enhance the speed to FNOL when property is damaged, such as flood sensors in basements to alert homeowners and insurers of immediate water damage.
Most insurtech products today focus on a mix of expanding carrier product offerings and expanding data collection for analysis.
WaterStreet Company connects with any number of third-party insurtech solutions through our advanced API capabilities. Here are examples of insurtech providers we have partnered with:
- Flexible payment methods by Forte
- Property analytics by CoreLogic
- Sales and marketing analytics by IVANS
Insurtech by WaterStreet Company
WaterStreet Company offers insurance technology for carriers, MGAs and MGUs to thrive. Our solutions bring insurance data together across the business, strengthen communication between carriers and agencies, and offer advanced learnings to empower the company’s decision making, all within one unified platform.
We welcome insurtech and support our insurers to reach the best of next-generation capabilities.
Reach out to WaterStreet Company today to request a consultation and demo.
