Over the past decades, insurance companies have implemented a variety of core applications supporting different aspects of the business. The end state is a complex system landscape, sometimes with redundant functions requiring a high level of resources to maintain and generating disproportionate costs.
In a new report, Seeking Simplicity: A Historical and Future Perspective on Underwriting System Segmentation, Celent draws on the results of a survey covering aspects related to underwriting and policy administration platform segmentation, the use of shared components and services approaches, and cross-country application deployment:
“We observe that insurers have arrived at their current underwriting and policy administration system segmentation in a haphazard but low risk manner, often through mergers and acquisitions or through market entry.” says Craig Beattie, Analyst with Celent’s Insurance Group and coauthor of the report,
“In both cases, shifts in distribution trends over time have led to insurers re-entering existing markets often with new systems and frequently leaving the existing legacy system running the existing book of business,” adds Nicolas Michellod, Senior Analyst with Celent’s Insurance Group and coauthor of the report.
This report also provides the Celent view about trends we can observe and some recommendations to insurers around implementation of automation of processes and straight-through processing.
