Insurance companies are notorious for running complex core system landscapes. However, insurers over the last few decades have been trying to improve their situation to better serve their business needs and reduce license and maintenance costs.

In the report System Standardization in Insurance: The Complexity of Simplification, Celent provides findings of a survey launched in the fourth quarter of 2014. The survey’s objective was to understand what insurance companies have been doing in terms of IT standardization.

“Business considerations are the most important factors that drive system segmentation decisions,” says Nicolas Michellod, a senior analyst with Celent’s Insurance practice and author of the report. “Insurers want to focus on process automation (straight-through processing) where possible, which is the main reason they consider when standardizing their systems.”

This report looks at application standardization, principles used by insurers to standardize their systems, and what they plan to do in the future. Celent also offers descriptions and recommendations of analysis tools that can be used as a framework to help them simplify and standardize their system landscape.

This report contains 14 figures.