At the AWS re:Invent Conference a few weeks ago, Accenture had the good fortune to share a breakout session with our client, Guardian Life Insurance Company. As they described their business strategy for improving top- and bottom-line growth, something struck me: it all flowed directly from their cloud strategy. Everything they described made good business sense, but one element stood out. Flexibility.
Flexibility is a necessity for insurers today. Technology and market demands are changing so fast there’s barely any time to slow down. It’s almost like changing the tires while the car is still moving. But companies that are flexible enough to change direction when necessary – even as the tires are being changed – will have a clear advantage. Guardian did just that when it adopted the cloud for its core insurance systems. It leveraged cloud flexibility with a configurable, no-code policy administration system. By adopting these two technologies simultaneously, Guardian sped up their product development and reduced their operating costs.
Guardian isn’t alone in adopting the cloud for their core insurance systems. We’re seeing a growing demand for cloud services among life insurance and annuity carriers. Like Guardian, they’re looking for flexible cloud pricing and hosting options that will maximize the cloud’s benefits for their individual business needs. For some insurers that could mean managing their own cloud; for others, hosting might make more sense. Regardless, the life insurers we work with are finding that cloud provides improved service and security, along with reduced operating costs.
More importantly, cloud empowers life insurers to drive business growth by better meeting their customers’ needs. It allows them to create new and differentiated products and services specifically tailored to their customers’ individual circumstances. Cloud also makes possible a seamless omnichannel experience for customers to access these new products and services. That’s a cloud strategy every life insurer can benefit from.
Whether you’re planning to operate in the cloud or are already there, I invite you to read this blog post A Cloud Transformation at Guardian Life. It explains Guardian’s cloud approach and describes how they’re developing products faster using the Accenture Life Insurance & Annuity Platform (ALIP) running on AWS.
I’m happy to answer your questions or discuss how we can advance your digital insurance cloud strategy.
