Realising Organisational Benefits from Digital Transformation · We are midway through simplifying...

Financial Services Technology Media

where the market meets

FST Media and Oracle hosted an exclusive roundtable luncheon with Chief Information Officers (CIOs); Divisional Heads of Information Technology (IT), Digital, Strategy and Transformation; and General Managers of business lines from Australia’s top insurance companies to discuss emerging trends in harnessing digital channels and consolidated infrastructure for superior customer experience. Key issues included the continued focus on agile, simplifying legacy systems to a single platform, achieving return on investment on digital investments, managing the shift to an information-centric culture, supporting

real-time customer interactions and leveraging big data to deliver customised insurance products and services. Following is an abstract of the discussion.

Ewald BruggEman, OraclE: Digital is on most insurers’ minds. There is a key focus on how the emerging role of digital channels is raising the bar for customer engagement; the trends in supporting real-time customer interactions and having efficient systems to support them; developments in consolidating multiple legacy systems; and finally, what it means to achieve a return on any type of investment you are making in digital technology.

Top row (from left to right): Roger Soppe, Senior Director, Global Business Team Insurance, Oracle; Colin Ahern, General Manager, Marketing, Communications and Strategic Sales, QBE; Matt Pancino, Head of Business Technology Applications, Suncorp; David Krawitz, Chief General Manager, Workers Compensation, Allianz; Ram Kumar, Chief Information Officer-Asia, IAG; Ewald Bruggeman, Senior Director, FSI Business Consulting, Oracle; Tim Tez, Head of Product and Marketing, AIA; Mark Patterson, Head of Business Solutions and Change, OnePath; Dermot Roche, General Manager, Customer Relationship Management, Medibank Health Solutions. Bottom row (from left to right): David Campbell, Head of Business Delivery, CommInsure; Maria Zozobrado, Head of IT – Distribution, Product and Marketing, Challenger; Gary Shlom, Managing Director, Head of CS STARS, Asia Pacific, Marsh; Elaine Maclean, Head of Insurance Marketing, MLC; Rashik Pal, Acting Head of Insurance Technology, BT Financial Group; Salil Akolkar, Sales Director – FSI, Oracle.

Realising Organisational Benefits from Digital Transformation

rEalising OrganisatiOnal BEnEfits frOm digital transfOrmatiOn

2

matt PancinO, suncOrP: We try to strike a balance between IT assets being as close to the business as possible and aggregating them centrally to gain scale advantages and accelerate our capabilities. Our focus areas are claims and policy administration, digital channels and business intelligence. As time moves on, we see more and more convergence with the importance of customer data. It is an area that is playing out quickly.

We were early adopters in the agile space, which for us focuses on delivering business value faster. We are now pushing the boundaries further by building continuous delivery teams where product, marketing and IT teams are all co-located and building functionality almost in real-time or at least on a weekly basis.

Speed is our priority and sometimes you have to invest in speed to get the return.

Obviously digital is incredibly important to all aspects of our business. In the past 12 months, our internet banking transactions have grown by 300 per cent, which has caused enormous challenges for our back-end ageing legacy platforms. Thirty-four per cent of our total logons are via mobile devices. When building our online properties, we start from mobile devices through to the desktop, rather than the more traditional way of building your browser sites first.

It is obvious that this growth creates a challenging environment. How do you keep pace with this growth and with your customers across such diversity? Whether on Android or iOS devices, peoples’ usage habits are changing with the diversity of options they have to consume information. The question is: how do you build an organisation where you give value to the right channel at the right time?

Personalisation is a major part of enabling that future, and provides better customer interaction. We are investing heavily in personalisation in terms of how people seek out products and services. Even within our privacy constraints we can do a lot to better understand and serve visitors to our sites. Already, many companies have released safe driving applications for iPhones which are starting to track telemetry data that feeds into how you price and drive products, particularly in the insurance industry around risk.

Finally, when we think about speed with technology teams, everyone has dealt with the fact that traditionally IT projects cost an obscene amount of money and take way too long. At Suncorp it has been critical for us to utilise new open source tools that let us create mobile versions of websites in weeks, rather than months, using just three or four people. Many technologies coming into play are lowering the cost of engagement, which is a tremendous opportunity for all large corporates. It also creates a real threat because now anyone with a decent idea can set up infrastructure and build capability in a relatively short period of time. As a result, we are seeing more potential competitors and opportunities for our traditional markets to be disrupted.

Fortunately, our entire business understands the need to be agile and adaptive. We now choose partnerships based on their ability to execute quickly and in our way of operating. When we think about speed, we think about creating an environment where you can test and deploy to production extremely quickly. You do not really know how customers will respond until you get into production so now many of our development practices are aimed at deploying into production with speed. This demands we simplify our environment.

We are midway through simplifying that back-end environment. We currently have 14 mainframe policy systems but within the next 12 months we will decommission all of those capabilities and have one multi-brand back-end and front-end that will still provide brand differentiation for our Group. From an online perspective, we have built all the online capabilities from the ground up with a ‘continuous delivery’ philosophy from day one.

david Krawitz, allianz: You are both a bank and an insurance company, and banking is more transactional − do you see material differences between the banking and insurance side?

matt PancinO, suncOrP: From an infrastructure and support viewpoint, a bank is vastly different to an insurance company. The risk appetite we have in the bank is substantially less in our core systems, networks and capabilities, although both banking and insurance have regulatory hurdles.

salil aKOlKar, OraclE: There is talk about how a single customer view is very important in business. Where is Suncorp heading to obtain that single customer view?

matt PancinO, suncOrP: It is one thing to have a single view; it is another to be able to act on it. As part of our Building Blocks program we built a single customer data warehouse. We have at our fingertips the details of our eight and a half million customers. How that translates into opportunities for the Group is the next stage of our maturity. This will solidify the Group as one company with many brands.

dErmOt rOchE, mEdiBanK hEalth sOlutiOns: From a business perspective, how do you prioritise what you test? I imagine everybody in the organisation comes up with wonderful ideas. matt PancinO, suncOrP: We have many pockets where things are done in traditional ways. Once a year we prioritise the portfolio and, big surprise, everyone wants to do more than they can afford. So we cull! If you are not careful you get into this weird prioritising process that is not connected to what is going on in the market; it becomes more connected to your budgetary planning cycle which is wrong.

If I look at some of our newer assets, where we have product and marketing teams together, the

“Speed is our priority and sometimes you have to invest in speed to get the return.” – Matt Pancino, Suncorp


3

budget cycle is very simple. We decide how much capacity we have and the teams collaborate to determine what the most important thing is.

rOgEr sOPPE, OraclE: Was moving to agile a big cultural change?

matt PancinO, suncOrP: We have invested a lot over our five year agile journey, and it continues. Some of our teams would compare comfortably on any international benchmark in how they operate and build solutions. That said, we still have some teams working in the older ways. It is a continuum; we are driving towards a level of maturity and it involves a massive cultural change.

maria zOzOBradO, challEngEr: Talking about consistent customer experience, are you investing equally in call centre technology, parallel to enhancements to your web infrastructure?

matt PancinO, suncOrP: During Building Blocks our biggest investment was our single claims platform for our call centres. We are very conscious that our brands represent different things to different people, even though the core infrastructure is the same. Over the next 12 months, we will complete the core infrastructure that will serve all of our call centres without taking away the ability for our brands to differentiate in their product or service offering.

It is interesting to me that the systems our customers and agents are using are coming closer together. Now when we build our online assets, those built for our customers were the ones built for our call centre. We simply ‘feature toggled’ more capability to our call centre agents. Again this drives our velocity.

ram Kumar, iag: You mentioned single claims and policy admin platforms. Do these mean common business processes for underwriting and claims across all your brands? matt PancinO, suncOrP: Worse – it also means single product definitions! It costs a lot, and that is where it starts getting difficult. So yes, it definitely means single processes. Each process has to be tailored. We do not want to generalise everything to the point where we lose our differentiation.

ram Kumar, iag: So is it more of a business transformation than an IT transformation? My view is that to achieve effective and efficient technology consolidation and standardisation across the organisation, business process standardisation and integration are critical. matt PancinO, suncOrP: I think the claims transformation was more IT-centered, whereas our policy one was probably 70 per cent business transformation.

ElainE maclEan, mlc: How important is real-time feedback from clients?

matt PancinO, suncOrP: It is critical and this is our next frontier. We get user feedback in real-time and analyse it on an ongoing basis. There are two things at play here – how you build something quickly and how you try it, get feedback and evolve.

ElainE maclEan, mlc: Was it difficult to get there culturally, or more from an infrastructure point of view?

matt PancinO, suncOrP: I think both. Not all of our legacy applications support this way of developing; but that should not be an excuse for not acting. Anything that is hard to do – daily releases, for example – you should try and do as often as possible and then you will create real change. This requires attitude and infrastructure.

Ewald BruggEman, OraclE: To grow online businesses and further accommodate customer service preferences, you will likely have to further simplify your products and processes as well. How achievable is this for the insurance industry?

ram Kumar, iag: We believe the future of insurance is where customers would use bespoke risk solutions that adapt to their changing lifestyles, business circumstances or needs. One size will not fit all. Customers will expect to access our company 24/7 – anywhere, anytime and in real-time, from any channel and from any device. They will jump between multiple channels to complete a transaction and will expect seamless integration and complete transparency across the entire value chain. Importantly, they will expect consistent experience across different channels.

Adding to this, customers will expect customised products and services which give them one-to-one experiences that are tailored to their needs. Product and process simplification are critical elements for digitisation. However, product simplification in the future should cater for customised product offerings – this is critical. These are the challenges the insurance industry will have to address if it wants to thrive in a digital economy.

We look at the customer experience, at customer synchronicity and digitalisation. While everyone talks about moving from being a product-centric organisation to customer-centric organisation; my view is that if we aim to be an information-centric organisation – where we provide the right information to the right people at the right time, in the right context, in the right format, with the right quality and with the right level of security – we will achieve customer-centricity. The key ingredient for digitisation is access to timely, reliable and context-centric data.

The challenge we have in doing this is the cultural shift to understanding that information is

“We believe the future of insurance is where customers would use

bespoke risk solutions... One size will not fit all.”

– Ram Kumar, IAG


4

the lifeblood of our insurance business; a mantra that would in turn achieve customer-centricity. As our business grows, people, processes and technologies change; but our data keeps growing all the time. How effectively and efficiently we use data to generate sustainable value for the business is what we are looking at. This is a complete shift in the way we operate. In fact one of the key focus areas for our Board-approved technology strategy and roadmap is information management and synchronicity to enable digitalisation and achieve effective and efficient decision making through rich and quality analytics. Ewald BruggEman, OraclE: Do you see substantial growth in online sales and service?

ram Kumar, iag: Yes, there is no question about it. It is beyond just online capability; the success lies in giving superior and rewarding experiences to our customer online. Information management is a fundamental building block. We need to invest to create a platform for digitisation, which will also enable effective and efficient use of our internal and external big data. By linking both the internal and external data sources, a rich and rewarding online customer experience is a reality.

Ewald BruggEman, OraclE: If you run a social media channel, it is all about monitoring sentiment; you are optimising engagement, but you are also personalising your marketing and services. Is it worth experimenting? Would you consider first convincing your organisation internally to build a business case to justifiy such a channel?

cOlin ahErn, QBE: The first thing about social media is that everybody wants to be active in it, but they do not necessarily understand all of the elements. We have had to be strenuous in defining what social media actually is.

We are currently conducting a pilot with one of our network groups to see, from an insurance perspective, if social media can actually ‘kick’ and whether to use it for information, to sell or for some other purpose.

From a QBE perspective, much of our focus is on brokers rather than direct customers. But when we do deal with direct customers, we find the younger generation wants to have an active conversation rather than a process online.

So how do you get the balance right? Our process is to improve our online presence so the experience is more seamless for the customer. Social media for us at the moment is experimental. We are still finding customers want to talk to somebody. Customer purchases are challenging because you do not want surprises; you want it to be an effective deal so that the customer does not feel compromised when something happens that their policy does not cover.

Ewald BruggEman, OraclE: How are you approaching channel integration, such that your staff understand your customers and how to quickly serve them with additional products and services to cover their specific needs?

david Krawitz, allianz: Our approach at Allianz is for differentiating channels, we have a differentiated experience. You want the back-end to be as similar as possible, and the customer-facing side as differentiated as possible.

The nature of our business is such that if we do not have customisation, we will put ourselves out of business. If we all just agree that there is going to be one policy that everyone sells, we would merely be marketing on the cheapest price and that is all we would ever be. The question is, how do you get customisation and make it easy, quick and cheap? I think customisation is what makes us successful, and that is not going to change – if anything, it is going to become a bigger part of what we do.

Ewald BruggEman, OraclE: Talking about back-end modernisation, which is essential to create the best customer experience in real-time, in a sense you need to modernise all around the place. What is your strategy for that?

david Krawitz, allianz: I do not get directly involved in the IT side. I am fortunate in the sense that I can make those demands without having to make sure they get done.

rashiK Pal, Bt financial grOuP: BT is part of the Westpac Group and so is our customer data. We are looking at simplicity and focusing on being a customer-centric organisation, and therefore customer data is important. Like most other companies, we have got a set of organisations that have come together over many years and they have brought their own set of customer data.

In the customer-centric design work we have recently done in the insurance space, we found that the customer expects to spend some time with you to give you personal information. So it is not always going to be the simplest of products that will get you the market share; it will also be the level of detail customers expect you to know about them before they trust you have given them the right sort of cover and service. Ewald BruggEman, OraclE: Every time customers go online, a lot of data – for example, how they search and navigate – can be collected to better understand their specific needs in real-time. How are insurance providers leveraging big data in that regard?

david camPBEll, cOmminsurE: For me, the real issue is about the insights the data provides rather than the actual collection. We have access to masses of information, but our group insurance

“The nature of our business is such that if we do not have customisation, we will put ourselves out of business.” – David Krawitz, Allianz

“The customer expects to spend some time with you ... customers expect you to know about them before they trust you have given them the right sort of cover and service.” – Rashik Pal, BT Financial Group


5

clients demand more than that. So we see ourselves as having more of an educational role at this point.

In terms of infrastructure, the group insurance data our clients provide gives us particular insights around pricing, positioning, behaviours, life stages and so on for a grouping of people, rather than access to individual personal data. You have obviously got the direct type businesses that are doing well with customer data. Being able to get core preliminary insights is probably the key issue for group insurers, especially around data and how this translates to a meaningful outcome for the client.

We are looking at how we can educate based on what the insights are telling us, to then take people on a journey rather than targeting individual customer analysis. The life companies, particularly in group insurance, are probably the least mature of the sector in how they use information. Big data is a secondary sort of issue. It is more about better use of the infrastructure the group insurance space has.

We have two and a half million group insurance clients and we engage intimately with approximately one per cent of them at claims and underwriting. Therefore, trends and analysis is more around a bucket of information. Group insurance data is relatively embryonic compared to how many of the broader insurance websites use the data.

marK PattErsOn, OnEPath: Group clients are always going to be a challenge – everyone else’s basic focus is to get that single view, but no matter what we do, we will never be perfect. We always need some way of catering to those people who walk into branches and say: “by the way, there is also this other stuff”.

dErmOt rOchE, mEdiBanK hEalth sOlutiOns: Here is a different spin. From a health insurance perspective, out of Medibank’s 3.8 million members, two to three per cent actually consume about 40 per cent of the $4 billion dollars spent on hospital bills.

We are trying to use technology to capture the lead indicators associated with poor health and chronic disease. From these lead indicators, we can offer our members health interventions which are designed to both prevent the onset of disease and manage the disease. Both the public and private sectors are looking at ways of trying to stop the uncontrollable flow of funds when people arrive in hospital by introducing up-stream preventative and disease management interventions.

tim tEz, aia: From a group insurance perspective, imperfect data is sometimes an excuse. Data does not have to be perfect. We are talking to many of our clients about their customers’ needs and implementing campaigns and solutions to increase customer engagement. I suspect more than anything else it is about getting the attention of the leaders of the life company.

Ewald BruggEman, OraclE: From a broker perspective, what services can customers expect from a broker if they go online, rather than just making the call and checking out some of the services being provided?

gary shlOm, marsh: That is a very interesting question, as Marsh specialises in the ASX 100 and Fortune 500 large corporate institutions. For these clients, there is much more emphasis on partnerships and relationships, many of which go back a number of years. I think the online platform offers a greater appeal for our middle market and small and medium enterprise clients, as well as perhaps employees of our larger clients who are looking at personal insurance lines.

From experience, we also know that our clients’ interaction with our website extends far beyond the transactional function. Many of them frequently access papers and other relevant material such as information and data about industry trends and risks, all of which are provided online.

Currently, Marsh clients who use our CS STARS Risk Management Information System (RMIS) are able to go online and view reporting mechanisms, including executive dashboards, to determine risks at any given point in time. The value there is more around risk analysis reporting, rather than the purchasing of insurance .

cOlin ahErn, QBE: In the small to medium enterprise space, there is a role for online. We have a relationship with some South Africans who worked at Macquarie. Their model is a unique set of questions that translates across broad industries, but also questions that are unique to specific industries. They tailored their front-end engagement towards that – their model allows customers to complete online but they can also ring a number if they are concerned about insurance risks.

It is an end-to-end solution that is really targeted, like trades people who often think about insurance when they are on somebody’s doorstep. So right there you can actually issue the insurance for a business that probably has less than 10 employees. They are not necessarily looking for the advice model that a broker might traditionally offer.

There is a role for brokers to play in that online space, but it has to be efficient for the broker too. How do you get that click-through and still make it an affordable model? You then probably need to retain a customer for about seven years for the customer to pay for itself.

Ewald BruggEman, OraclE: So you try to give some assistance to the broker in the online space? cOlin ahErn, QBE: Sometimes you choose to talk to a customer, sometimes customers want to talk to a broker; it is about trying to service those different needs.

“Group clients are always going to be a challenge – everyone else’s basic focus is to

get that single view... no matter what we do, we will never be perfect.”

– Mark Patterson, OnePath

“From a group insurance perspective, imperfect

data is sometimes an excuse.”

– Tim Tez, AIA


6

gary shlOm, marsh: Another emerging area of interest for clients, based on what we have observed globally, is benchmarking data and analytics.

Being one of the largest risk management groups in the world, we find there is cross-pollination of data information across different industry sectors. If you can distil the data through obfuscation, you can record information across millions of claims or policy records. Clients may go online and see what other industry groups are doing from a pre- and post-loss risk control standpoint. That is very valuable information for companies in working through their own risk management processes.

rOgEr sOPPE, OraclE: We would all agree that the buying experience is very different. For life carriers, it is not only growing your businesses, but also reaching a segment of the market in an under-served area. For general insurance carriers, you are essentially changing wallet share among carriers but life risk is growth. The market is probably near a point where those who are going to buy the product have bought it and you do not have any of the growth opportunity.

Matt talked about the huge role for online transactions and the propensity of that to increase. How do you keep pace with that growth? That leads into the question: are you being hampered by technology?

At some stage you will reach tipping point, where your back-end systems doing these online transactions and providing this data are simply not able to keep up with the demands on the front-end.

Instead of writing traditional code you ask where technology can take you next. What does a rules-based system mean to a legacy system where I am writing traditional code in that system? How do I draw that collaboration and drive an agile methodology by allowing people to do configuration instead of traditional coding. We are finding that modern technology allows for an adaptive approach. It exposes business rules and gives you flexibility to drive your business the way you want to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Traditional legacy systems were designed to do something the same way each time. If multiple carriers invested in a legacy system, you are limited to how much you can change that system because it is designed to do transaction and processing around products in one specific way. Business rules expose that logic and allow you to take an adaptive system and drive that business and really differentiate yourself from the market because you do not have the same constraints around the legacy code that you would find in older systems.

marK PattErsOn, OnEPath: We are taking data out of legacy systems and putting it into a central database that allows easy access and gets updated regularly. It creates challenges, as you say, in regard to real-time. But as long as we continue to accept a

24-hour lag, then that is not a problem. However, that will only last for so long. We are not quite at that tipping point, but it is coming. rOgEr sOPPE, OraclE: Often the digital front-end is ahead of back-end systems. Your customer may not be seeing the same challenges you are having, where you are providing a new buying experience for them. But is that transaction really completed in one-day in real-time or are the back-end systems still batch?

ElainE maclEan, mlc: From a our perspective, [life insurance] is a relatively low interest category. We need to find the right times and the right reasons to create relevant conversations with the client. What we are looking to do is to increase engagement with our customers, as the more interaction the customer has, the more likely they are to stick with you. But the key is to define the right points to have a conversation that makes it relevant for them. How do we make [life] insurance a higher interest category than it currently is? People typically do not buy [life] insurance. Our Executive General Manager MLC Insurance is from a general insurance background, and we already see benefits of leveraging expertise and thinking from general insurance category into life insurance. david Krawitz, allianz: So you are implying that general insurance is a high-interest product? ElainE maclEan, mlc: Well, there is definitely higher interest than life [insurance] on the basis that people are more likely to claim more often.

Ewald BruggEman, OraclE: You come to the point that the majority of Australians are under-insured from a life insurance perspective. Digital and online might give you better capabilities, enabling people to clarify the products and the value that they get. These days, it is more about video streams informing people than them having to read through lots of material.

david camPBEll, cOmminsurE: Education is a key focus for us. Condensing a product definition statement into a two minute YouTube video is very powerful.

Ewald BruggEman, OraclE: So is that part of your online growth strategy?

david camPBEll, cOmminsurE: Very much so. Education is a mutual dependency on the client, and as a big organisation we bring infrastructure to the table that they do not have access to. It provides you with an education point as well as an opportunity to act to support their needs.

ElainE maclEan, mlc: One of the points that we made earlier is the fact that more customers want to

“Education is a key focus ... Condensing a product definition statement into a two minute YouTube video is very powerful.” – David Campbell, CommInsure

“The key is to define the right points to have a conversation that makes it relevant for [the customer].” – Elaine Maclean, MLC


7

do more directly. It is really about understanding the customer and what they need. Responding to what the customer wants today and tomorrow is a real challenge for the big established insurers.

matt PancinO, suncOrP: Everyone is going to have different needs, and I do not think anyone has the magic answer to how we are going to service our customers over the next six months or even the next week. Our philosophy is that you have to value adaptability and be able to respond quickly: how much energy did you expend on the failures and how quickly can you adapt? ram Kumar, iag: Digitisation coupled with social computing is changing the way customers think, operate and their expectation of service levels. In the future, customers will have unlimited access to information about our products and in some cases know more about our organisation than our customer-facing staff.

Ewald BruggEman, OraclE: We see three key future critical success factors for your industry. The first is about [using] information – to improve performance in terms of operational and management excellence, and to understand customer needs better and faster.

Secondly, it is about expertise. If you do more online, you need to have different skill sets for people to do quick trials on designs, put them in traffic and monitor the response. There will also be a different type of skill set for those that deal with more complex sales and services from an advisory perspective.

The third factor is about technology, to enable every aspect of the business model. For real-time operations and services, technology will do the heavy lifting. Recent research confirmed there will be a digital tipping point for your industry in the next two years, with a major impact on your business if you do not do anything specifically in that domain.

Are you seeing sufficient initiative flowing through your organisations, and equally leadership behind it, to be able to anticipate [the impact of] this potential digital disruption?

gary shlOm, marsh: I think it is increasingly what our global clients are looking for. We are seeing an interesting trend where our global clients are advising they no longer desire customisation. They require configuration-based platforms. To achieve speed, you really need standardisation across people, processes and systems. Customisation for each specific client is no longer sustainable and efficient.

rOgEr sOPPE, OraclE: If I return to Matt’s comments about mini companies, are you running systems under different brands and for different lines of business? Is your super on a separate

platform? Is it grouped on a different platform? Do you have more than one life risk platform?

When you talk about change, speed and developing new products they are essentially the same, but are you repeating that process across multiple platforms? Is consolidating a faster way to get there or are you repeating those changes across many systems?

I do not know that many carriers have given strong consideration to bringing non-traditional lines onto a single platform. Not necessarily general insurance, but the super business, the group business, and the life-risk business. I suspect some may be doing part of that today, but most of you are probably running discrete systems because there is no way to change the systems that you have today – they were designed to run a single line of business and may be doing it okay.

That is another one of those tipping points; how much do you invest in the systems that you have now before you look at newer technology that may be able to bridge multiple lines into a single platform and again propel that speed and growth in a way that you have not thought of in the past? david Krawitz, allianz: Ewald, Roger – you spoke about the business and customer benefits from digital, but we did not talk about the significant risks. If you look at the UK market, they have moved to an aggregated model. You would have to argue digital has been a disaster for insurance in the UK because all it has done is force everybody to go to the cheapest products in the market. How does an industry avoid something like that in Australia? rOgEr sOPPE, OraclE: You have to differentiate and part of the differentiation is not just a brand but it is in the service that you provide. So you are right, general insurance has become somewhat of a bore. Some would argue that it is a commodity product. So what really differentiates one insurance company from another?

One would say it is the online services and the customer service that you are providing those individuals. What are they expecting and what are you able to deliver that keeps them at renewal time from going online and shopping? Is service enough of a differentiator to keep the client?

david Krawitz, allianz: It seems that one of Google’s largest revenue streams is from keywords and insurance. How big a deal is it for an organisation like Google and how big a part of their business model has this become?

rOgEr sOPPE, OraclE: I can refer to the US market and carriers like Progressive who offer one-stop comparative quotes across multiple carriers. Yet those companies still thrive as they are differentiating because of the service, value and brand they offer. True, the ultimate buying

“Responding to what the customer

wants today and tomorrow is a real

challenge for the big established insurers.”

– Elaine Maclean, MLC

“[Our clients] no longer desire customisation.

They require configuration based platforms ...

Customisation for each client is no longer

sustainable and efficient.” – Gary Shlom, Marsh


decision for some individuals is going to be price, but I think there is a large segment of the market where price is not the only factor. It is value and relationship building that brought that person to you and it is more likely to keep that person with you.

cOlin ahErn, QBE: In the Australian market we see that, with a couple of clicks, you can change. We find more propensity for this in ‘grey nomads’ because they find it fun to surf the internet and change their compulsory third party for as little as a dollar, but there is no real differentiation. But what we do find is that there is still some brand loyalty as long as you service the customer well, which is QBE’s expectation. Our proposition in the market at QBE is not to be the cheapest.

We do see that the market will change and that is why you have to get smarter at what you are doing in digital. You identify what you want to do and leverage your proposition around that, which digital marketing allows you to do. You can refine and change your proposition to the market that you want to attract. Ewald BruggEman, OraclE: Extensive customer research is showing that if you provide excellent service, it is not always about price,

and that is where the differentiation should be for your organisation.

rOgEr sOPPE, OraclE: It is not just the buying experience you think about – that is only the front-end. The most important part is that we all buy insurance to protect our property because we all know we are going to have a loss. It is just a matter of when. Those who provided the best service in the Queensland floods probably increased their market share because that is where you show value; when people need you the most.

Again, the shopping online experience is going to appeal to part of the demographic. The differentiator is going to come the day they file that first notice of loss. You need to live up to the promises you made in that contract by delivering service when it is absolutely needed at the most critical time. Ewald BruggEman, OraclE: In summary, I know we are living in challenging times, and for some organisations it might be an unprecedented challenge to avoid a digital disruption. It is hard to predict the future, but it is not so hard to prepare for it. There is a lot of expertise available to give guidance and to move forward quickly if you think that is essential. So strategic partnering is certainly a very critical outcome to consider. *

About OracleOracle industry solutions leverage the company’s best-in-class portfolio of products to address complex business processes relevant to Insurance, helping speed time to market, reduce costs, and gain a competitive edge. Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com.

Financial Services Technology Media

where the market meets

About FST MediaFST Media produces the most successful technology conferences, roundtables and publications for the banking, insurance and wealth management sectors across the Asia Pacific region. FST Media prides its reputation on unparalleled access to senior executives, and the delivery of high-quality information on trends and disruptions in the financial services sector.

“The market will change and that is why you have to get smarter at what you are doing in digital.” – Colin Ahern, QBE

Realising Organisational Benefits from Digital Transformation · We are midway through simplifying...

Documents

Transcript of Realising Organisational Benefits from Digital Transformation · We are midway through simplifying...