Blueriq will present these co-insurance solutions at the VIP Congress (July 1st in Leusden). This event offers insurers and other interested parties the opportunity to experience Blueriq's innovations and discover how these solutions can help improve their business operations. Blueriq also has a limited number of tickets to give away. Would you like to attend? Please let us know by sending an email via the button below. (Please note: first come, first served)
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For standard processes with a fixed sequence of steps, many repetitive actions, unambiguous data, and broad applicability of knowledge and business rules, the benefits generally outweigh the automation costs. This is different for processes that rarely repeat exactly, involve many exceptions or special situations, heavily rely on specific experience, knowledge, and skills of people, and contain a lot of unstructured data. In markets where this applies, you see that digitization progresses more slowly.
A good example is the co-insurance market. Everything that makes processes predictable is lacking in co-insurance. It's not without reason that specialists in this domain are proud of their expertise, because their work involves a lot of money: the risks are so large that they are shared among multiple insurers. Moreover, the risks are very complex and often international in nature. This ensures that the underwriting, renewal, and claims processes rarely follow a strict and predictable course, requiring the availability of extensive knowledge and experience.
The traditional approach of Business Process Management, on which the average mid- and back-office systems of brokers and insurers are based, cannot handle this well. These are often commodity systems that take (commodity) processes as the starting point for efficiency and bulk processing. That doesn't work for customization, which requires data-driven process support. The result is that either IT projects for custom support by these systems are disproportionately expensive, or they are not even started.
In the co-insurance market, the latter has largely been the case until now. Many manual actions are still performed throughout the chain: sometimes data is retyped up to 7 times from one system to another. And although the margins are sufficient to bear these costs, this way of working is also outdated for other reasons: the need for improved data analysis, limitation of accumulation risks, demonstrable compliance, and greater job satisfaction are important drivers to improve data quality throughout the chain, make it more accessible, and process it more efficiently.
This is also evident from the strategic agenda of the Association of Dutch Insurance Exchange (VNAB), in which the digitization of the chain is a top priority. By offering unambiguous data to all parties in the chain and by developing and maintaining generic standards and business rules, millions more can be saved throughout the entire chain.
But that brings a dilemma. If the VNAB becomes a data hub and provides standards, is it logical to also standardize service-oriented processes? No, because that is precisely where brokers and insurers distinguish themselves to their clients. If the VNAB offers generic solutions for these processes, it undermines its own digitization goals. Because adoption of these solutions will lag as chain parties want to determine for themselves how they organize their services.
But how can chain parties differentiate themselves, or even innovate in their service-oriented processes, if their commodity IT systems are not suitable for automating their complexity? Gartner's model of a 'Layered Application Strategy' still guides thinking on this issue by assuming a clear separation between systems of record, systems of differentiation, and systems of innovation.
In the co-insurance market, this is the moment when digitization in the chain can accelerate. This requires the right choices from all parties in the chain. By supporting back-office processes with commodity systems, and by supporting service-oriented processes with knowledge technology that can derive tasks and processes from the available data. With technology designed to quickly develop and maintain business rules, so that changes in policy, the market, or legislation can be more easily incorporated into operations. In this way, knowledge-intensive services and customization can indeed be digitally supported, risks become more transparent, and the cost benefits of efficiency can be reaped. Without these IT projects entailing major risks in terms of complexity and costs. Who wouldn't want that?
The VNAB (Vereniging Nederlandse Assurantie Beurs - Association of Dutch Insurance Exchange) plays an important role in the exchange of object data between the involved parties with its iDOS system. Read our paper on how Blueriq implemented a connection with iDOS for a major Exchange insurer to retrieve object data, in order to subsequently check, enrich, and distribute it to internal systems such as the back office and CRM.
