Accenture hosted approximately 20 business and technology executives from leading U.S. insurance carriers at its annual Life and Annuity Software Client Advisory Board. Held late April in Nashville, the two-day meeting, themed Building a Community of Innovation, focused on the continued evolution of the Accenture Life Insurance & Annuity Platform (ALIP) and its digital innovations portfolio—ensuring alignment with customers’ business objectives.

We demonstrated new capabilities driven by our strategic roadmap and collaborated with participants on new opportunities emerging from disruption in the insurance industry. The strong relationship and cooperation we have with and across our client community is a valuable differentiation we enjoy in the market and helps ensure that ALIP remains the platform of choice by leading North American life and annuity providers.

Insurance innovation at speed and scale

This year’s meeting expanded upon the concept of digital innovation, not only with new products, but also the new connected insurance path forward, powered by Accenture technological innovation in AI, cloud and digital services. Accenture’s robust investment in AI will benefit insurers on ALIP. From intelligent automation in underwriting to an intelligent customer engagement platform, ALIP is advancing the use of AI, including robotic process automation (RPA), to improve efficiency and deliver a better customer experience. We’ve opened every possible service function of the platform to web services, so insurers can meet customers where they engage – digital assistants (Alexa, Google Assistant), online shopping sites, social media – and can integrate seamlessly with the platforms they use and the partners they work with.

Life and annuity insurance operations transform from data-driven to intelligence-enabled

Insurance technology executives continue to look at ways to leverage one of their most valuable assets — their data. Using an as-a-service model, we help insurers gain insights that can lead to opportunities using their ALIP data as well as third-party data. ALIP Analytics helps insurers improve outcomes in several business functions including: capturing new business and retaining it; product development and marketing; channel management; risk and regulatory compliance; and operational efficiency.

Operational efficiency remains one of the top priorities for insurance technology executives. It’s another opportunity to apply what we call “intelligent operations process improvement.” We’ll benchmark insurers’ use of ALIP within their end-to-end operation against industry best practices to determine the most value-added business process improvements. This is a powerful way for insurers to drive performance across their businesses – from product to process performance – while addressing the uniqueness of each business.

Cloud and security remain top of mind for life and annuity insurers

With massive data supply chains feeding into AI systems, cloud adoption continues to deliver greater compute power and scale at much lower costs than on-premise deployments. We see a growing number of life and annuity providers deploying new business, underwriting and policy administration in the cloud. Two companies that attended the conference are preparing to deploy ALIP in the cloud, while a third is in its final evaluation. Security is their top priority, not only for the web services themselves, but also the software hosted on them. One of the reasons these insurers selected cloud deployment was Accenture’s robust security approach that includes three main differentiators: (1) governance and compliance throughout the software development lifecycle; (2) security implementation in our delivery methodologies; and (3) security operations spanning system integration and development. This approach uniquely positions Accenture as a single point of contact for insurers that deploy ALIP in the cloud.

Truly building a community of innovation

One of the most rewarding aspects of the conference was seeing the platform vision become reality, thanks to close collaboration with our clients. We’ve shifted to a more agile DevOps environment and a continuous release cycle to address the hastened pace of change and the constant disruption insurers face. We continue to strengthen our base platform and augment it with a digital front end and analytics back end, leveraging cloud and creating a marketplace for third-party providers. We are committed to providing the solutions life and annuity providers need to improve efficiency, cut costs, redefine business models and enable IT to drive business growth.

Learn more about the future of insurance technology and how, together with our clients, we’re delivering the future now. Download our latest research, Accenture Technology Vision for Insurance 2018.