Important reading for Insurers in Nigel Walsh's review of his 2016 Insurtech forecasts and new 2017 ideas.
I would add one other major impact.
The industry standard insurance ERP platforms like Guidewire, SAP, 1Insurer, Systema etc I liken to the legacy CRM products now displaced by Salesforce.com. They do anything you want but complex needing:-
- armies of consultants to deploy and maintain
- large capital and revenue budgets
- maybe worst of all just so slow to deploy and iterate.
What's required is a Salesforce.com equivalant that can be implemented fast without having to throw out the current legacy systems.
Simple, secure, scalable URL linkage between the new cloud platform and the legacy back-office systems.
Not just for the niches, like Lemonade, but for the bread & butter insurance like:-
- Vehicle Insurance- private, business & commercial
- Building & Contents- private and commercial
- Pets
- Travel
All on a transaction based licensing model e.g. per claim processed so as to be commercially viable.
I predict some of the largest global insurers will implement this strategy in 2017 whilst laggards will wait on the sidelines only to dive in during 2018.
Orchestration. With all of these startups in InsurTech now, we will quickly need to understand where and what role the InsurTech plays. Are they are platform play, end product play, point disruptor or more. Regardless, given the volume and velocity of data generation, the importance of both API connectivity and the ability to orchestrate these will increase dramatically. Again for me, table stakes.