T he smart and strategic use of technology can be a genuine game-changer for many businesses, enabling you to achieve efficiency, innovation, and offer an enhanced customer experience. However, in many businesses today, the adoption of technology has often been at a departmental level, meaning data silos and a lack of a truly holistic view. Research shows that only 18% of Australian businesses are fully integrated from a tech perspective, and businesses with fully integrated systems are six times more likely to report significantly outperforming peers compared to those with little or no integration. 1 The drive for a holistic, integrated tech business needs to come from the top – from leaders who have a view across the whole organisation. Ammon Mackie, General Manager, Commercial Business Transformation at Allianz Australia, says, “It’s been important for businesses to have leadership that understands digital for a long time now, and it’s becoming even more important as we find ourselves in a far more complex digital and data environment. “Business leaders need to understand how all of it comes together to unlock business value. Within the broker area, it really is becoming critically important to unlock value and find those efficiencies and insights.” The value of a holistic view With so many interconnected pieces of information, having an integrated approach to data is integral to the success of digital projects today. Matthew Churchill, Director of Customer Success at Cytora says, “For a number of years, insurance businesses have been thinking about digitisation, but for a while that term didn’t have a huge amount of meaning behind it. “What is digitisation? Is it someone manually entering information into a digital system? Is it sending an email rather than a fax?” “Over time, it’s become clearer what digitisation should mean: information exists in a digital format that can be critiqued, interacted with, and that information can be turned into something more meaningful for the company.” Research has found that 81% of IT leaders say data silos are hindering digital transformation efforts, making it impossible to leverage modern, secure AI models built on unified data 2 , and Churchill says a key is to build ways of working that increase productivity while continuing to work in the way the market already works – which is a challenge. “The market is still very conversational, so it’s challenging to capture the information and trends, and then store and transmit that information,” says Churchill.
“It’s inherently challenging, however the big global players see it as a play for the future, and believe that if they don’t start this with earnestness now, technology will have moved on so rapidly that they will start missing out.” Churchill says thinking has evolved from immediate one- year productivity use cases to scenarios that focus on scaling up, For example, “What happens if we grow to five times the size we are now”? Or the possibilities enabled by strong data ingestion – “What happens if we collect decline information as richly as submission data?”
“The more data you have, the more you can apply the most modern technologies to it,” he says.
“We keep the older legacy systems around, but we minimise their use as much as possible until it gets to a point that we’re able to replace them completely.”
Lessons to learn from Allianz’s digital transformation Over the past 18 months, Allianz has undergone significant digital transformation to help ensure it is well and truly setting itself up to take advantage of those ‘what if’ scenarios outlined by Churchill. And, while the scale of a business such as Allianz may be vastly different from many brokers’ businesses, there are lessons to be shared that can help brokers implement new technologies successfully in their own organisations.
38 A NIBA Brokers’ Guide: to leveraging technology in insurance
Made with FlippingBook Digital Publishing Software