Workers’ compensation results are the best they’ve been in half a century. Monoline insurers are seeing significant pressures from multi-line insurers that are leveraging the availability of the other lines. And multi-line insurers are aggressively snapping up market share. But looming over the industry are trends such as emerging new exposures[1], direct-to-consumer distribution, and an aging workforce. How should workers’ compensation insurers think about these trends, and where can they invest in digital to transform and prepare for the inevitable future downturn? This report lays out some of the big strategic issues affecting workers’ compensation and describes where digital transformation is already taking place with a prediction for the future.

Workers’ compensation insurers looking out on the horizon see the changing customer expectations and the resulting competitive requirement of focusing on the customer experience to be among the most effective of the upcoming changes. This, combined with the power that technology can play, has a number of workers’ compensation insurers looking at their own capabilities and feeling challenged.

While insurers feel fairly confident about their ability to handle the basics of underwriting, claims and fraud, many feel challenged by the difficulty of changing their own culture while managing a digital transformation.

And monoline and State Compensation Insurance Funds (SCIFs), those insurers that are monoline, mono-state writers of workers’ compensation — often the insurer of last resort in their state, feel everything more acutely. The question is — are the changes influencing workers’ compensation more effective for monoline/SCIFs because they have no other lines to fall back on? Or, are they more insightful when it comes to the world of workers’ compensation — because it’s all they study?

[1] Note that this survey was fielded prior to COVID-19