Blog: Insurtech ecosystems connecting across industry sectors

Digital innovation is reshaping not just the insurance landscape, but all the industries and customer groups it serves.

Against this backdrop of transformational change and increasingly complex regulation, it’s more important than ever to connect and future-proof the insurtech ecosystem.  

With the pace of change in technology and consumer expectations accelerating, the ability to implement rapid updates and incorporate radically different formats will be essential in order to stay relevant in any industry.

For insurers, there will be the additional requirement of connecting beyond the immediate customer and supply chain networks: smart homes, driverless cars, automated farming and intelligent healthcare are all on the horizon, and their impact on insurance will be considerable.  

To exploit these emerging markets, management information hubs and inter-operability, which allows consumer technologies to be seamlessly linked to an insurer’s legacy and back-office systems, will be crucial.  

As leading companies in these sectors build their own inter-operable intelligent platforms, the data being accumulated in these new digital ecosystems is becoming ever more precise and useful for insurers looking to enhance their customer offering.

If the partner networks of insurance companies have so far have been well-defined and understood, firms will increasingly need the ability to connect to a whole new set of digital ecosystems being created outside of the sector.  

It’s important for investment in specific technologies to go hand-in-hand with moves to connect and future proof the wider insurtech ecosystem.

Enterprise information platforms, which have emerged as the preferred option to link these disparate systems, because of the flexibility they provide in accommodating different formats, must remain at the heart of the process, with secure central hubs allowing access to all the company’s interconnected data systems.  

Such data-rich central hubs will be the key tool in the automation of customer-centric and operational processes as a response to rising costs, and are set to provide unprecedented levels of connectivity, management control and oversight.

But most importantly, they will allow insurers to respond and adapt to innovations and challenges both from insurtech rivals and changing technologies.