Other parts of this series:
Insurers can use advanced technology such as cloud and DevOps to reduce costs and increase efficiency
In my previous post, I explored how leading financial services (FS) organizations are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation to boost revenue, reduce costs and increase efficiency across the enterprise.
In this post, I’ll discuss how cloud and DevOps can do the same.
Cloud as a vital business asset
Insurers in North America are changing the way they use cloud—and cloud is emerging as an important business asset. In Europe, insurers are also starting to see the benefits of cloud computing outweigh the challenges.
On both continents, moving to cloud holds big opportunities for insurers, such as:
- Improving speed to market and agility
The cloud is transforming the way businesses take advantage of technology to innovate. Companies that increase speed to business outcomes and innovate continuously will prevail.
- Reducing overall costs, and more specific capex
Reduce large capital expenditures associated with the implementation of in-house, proprietary solutions.
- Accelerating business growth
Companies are using the cloud to scale up rapidly without enormous capital investments.
- Expanding globally
Cloud computing services help insurers foster a high level of flexibility and standardization across multiple geographies.
- Reducing operating and maintenance costs
Insurance IT spending is still stagnant in many companies. Therefore, many insurance executives are looking for options that can help them achieve their cost-cutting objectives.
The use of disruptive technologies like the cloud is gaining significant momentum among insurtech firms. Worldwide, the following insurtechs are driving cloud-based solutions:
| Company | Cloud innovation |
| Trōv | Offers household insurance with a smart repository of customers’ possessions through a cloud-hosted online digital locker. |
| CoverWallet | Provides a concierge-like service for small businesses, giving them access to advice, quotes and policy management tools online or over the phone. |
| The Insurer Cloud | A Microsoft Corporation, cloud-based ‘route-to-market’ solution for insurance product creation and lifecycle product management for any class of P&C / general insurance business. |
| Versicherix | Switzerland’s first peer-to-peer insurance—the technical side of the platform is open, letting investors, reinsurers and customers freely enter the system. |
| FitSense Insurance Services | Working to price risk for insurance across age groups and gender. FitSense uses fitness tracking wearables and its mobile app to gather and collate users’ activity data. |
| Lemonade | This peer-to-peer insurer, originally focused on renters and homeowner insurance, is now pursuing a broader regulatory approval strategy after starting small. |
The value of DevOps for insurance
DevOps, a leading software engineering trend, brings business, development and operation teams together to streamline IT and apply more automated processes. Over the last 10 years, DevOps has enabled the shift in application delivery from large-scale, project-based system implementations and follow-on maintenance to a continuous evolution of applications.
The ability to roll out business capabilities continuously will be the difference between companies that evolve and ones that stagnate. By implementing DevOps, our clients deliver faster and have greater business agility. The four key benefits of DevOps are:
- Faster speed to market
Reduce time to market by up to 50 percent through streamlined software delivery.
- Increased throughput
Boost team productivity and deliver new functionality faster.
- Lower risk through automated quality and a different mindset
Identify quality concerns early through automated scans and a “you build it, you own it” mindset and reduce defects across the lifecycle by up to 30 percent.
- Improved security with resilience
Make your operational state more stable and secure and your changes systematically auditable.
The value of DevOps transformation for our clients: case studies
Through a program to industrialize delivery, a European retailer saved over $300 000 in build and deployment efforts, as well as $1 million in testing efforts. Accenture’s DevOps services provided tooling design, support, automated environment creation and ongoing environment support to deliver new applications in a multi-release, multi-production environment project. We helped industrialize delivery from the outset using continuous integration, automatic test environment creation, automated testing and automated quality gates.
An Asian telecommunications company created a new delivery model for Siebel, Java and TIBCO development based on agile and DevOps principles. Lifecycle automation, and organizational and process changes, significantly reduced effort and led to faster speed to market for application releases.
Are you ready to use advanced technologies to grow your business? In the next post, I’ll answer the question set out in my first post—how can you boost your return on investment in intelligent technologies? Until then, get in touch with me here to find out more, or read the following research materials: