This paper addresses how major insurance organizations are taking action to ensure they will be able to endure in the future. This includes what major insurers are doing to modernize their businesses to compete more effectively, and to stay relevant and healthy. We are particularly interested in how these insurers evaluate and manage risk and cost principles for their insurance technology investments, and how they are finding the right balance between maintaining their existing solutions, making investments to capture new opportunities and exploring the potential capabilities of insurance technology ecosystem partners.

Based on our interviews and research in insurance and other regulated industries, we have identified 10 practical and replicable provocations for insurers to focus on.

These 10 provocations are:

1. Investigating deep customer needs that have yet to be satisfied

2. Creating better alignment between IT and business operating models

3. Modernizing technology to build capabilities but also to achieve cost parity

4. Improving the ability to attract talent, especially people with insurance technology skills and expertise

5. Using core skills of understanding and balancing risk to transform technology and digitalize safely

6. Explicitly tying technology strategy to business strategy

7. Building an ecosystem and platform to support insurance by configuration

8. Mining for disruptive risk data

9. Showing transformational leadership behaviors

10. Using game play for determining the best ways to use technology to compete more effectively and differentiate the business