Insurance Business ReviewJanuary - March 202317insurtechs, such as Openly and Branch, deploya "single rate call" acquisition strategy that delivers a fully bindable quote in less than thirty seconds with only name, address, and date of birth. On the commercial side, "main street" business can be quoted with business name and address (augmented with third-party data), and cyber insurers such as Corvus and Coalition use proprietary technology to grade the cyber vulnerabilities of applicants to deliver an accurate quote via APIs.Self-serviceThe initial sale of the policy is just one step in the customer lifecycle. Significant overhead is spent by carriers on servicing existing customers. Most insurance companies have deployed tools for use by internal service staff, but the industry is still far from offering true self-service capabilities for brokers and policyholders.A microservices architecture with APIs that pass data across systems enables insurers to offer stakeholders the ability to process more service requests without carrier employees. For example, modern broker and customer portals provide a variety of self-servicing capabilities, including mid-term endorsements, mortgagee changes, certificate of insurance issuance, additional named insureds, and cancellations.Modern workflowWhat about processes not amenable to fully digital, "straight-through processing" such as middle market and large commercial underwriting or claims above a few hundred dollars? This is where modern, customizable workflow tools such as Snapsheet, Federato, and Send Technology come into play. These tools allow claims adjusters and underwriters to automate specific components of their workflows and prioritize the accounts they should be working on to maximize efficiency. They take the institutional knowledge that resides in the heads of claims adjusters and PDFs of underwriting guidelines and make them actionable at precisely the point in time where this information is needed.These tools look and feel like enterprise software tools like Trello, Pipedrive, and Salesforce, but they are purpose-built for the nuances of the insurance industry. Importantly, because these tools are built using API-driven microservices, an insurer with a modern tech stack can choose which modules or services are relevant for their business use case and decide whether to surface the functionalities inside of an internal UI/UX or work directly in the vendor's UI/UX.In closingPublic market insurtechs are nursing their losses today. But these businesses (and other well-capitalized companies in the private markets) continue to present a credible threat to incumbent players in the long term. There is an opportunity for large carriers to adopt the infrastructure of challengers and beat them at their own game. Most insurance companies have deployed tools for use by internal service staff, but the industry is still far from offering true self-service capabilities for brokers and policyholders
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