Podcast Audio Transcript
Mimi: Hello listeners, this is Mimi; thank you for tuning in to yet another exciting and informative podcast from us at Infosys BPM. Today, we are discussing about Enabling Life Insurance Carriers with Digital Transformation. And to talk about this, we have here with us, Baskar Sridharan, AVP & Sr. Product Line Manager. Welcome Baskar. How are you?
Baskar: I’m doing fine, Mimi. Thank you for having me in this podcast.
Mimi: It’s our pleasure. Baskar, when we look at the life insurance industry, we can see that there are a number of aspects that can affect the market. Could you give us an overview of the current insurance market?
Baskar: Of course, Mimi. There are several aspects that affect the industry. According to a McKinsey report, the future of the industry will be profoundly shaped by some megatrends that we saw emerging since 2020.
Post the pandemic, we saw a strong economic recovery in 2021. The impact of this on the insurance industry was noticeable. While premium growth slowed to approximately 1.2% in 2020 due to the pandemic onset and profits fell by 15%, 2021 saw a rapid rebound of the premium growth rate.
Shifts in macroeconomy and changes in competitive dynamics along with dramatic changes in customer and employer behaviors are some of the trends shaping the industry today. The pandemic has further impacted the industry through mortality changes. For example, the US average life expectancy has come down by a year, according to an article published by the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. Now there is higher demand and interest in small value policies. Carriers must innovate new products and launch them rapidly to grab the market opportunities, competing with insurtechs. To operate in such a dynamic market, the industry needs a solid product modeling coupled with a robust policy administration and customer servicing capabilities.
Mimi: I agree the market has changed a lot, Baskar.
Can you share some of the major trends that have shaped the insurance industry since 2020?
Baskar: Mimi, there are some highly disruptive megatrends shaping a new operating environment for insurers, challenging traditional ways of value creation. Let us look at some of these:
- There is a decoupling of macroeconomic environments in Asia, Europe, and North America, due to differences in interest rates and other changes in trade.
- We see a lot of new entrants – such as fintechs entering the annuities market with the sustained rising of interest rates
- There is a “power curve” in the market where the economic profit is unequally distributed.
- With changing end-customer demographics, there has been an accelerated adoption of the remote interaction model with customers.
- Our awareness of sustainability, climate change, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) has never been higher.
In addition, we have adopted new ways of working, and we have renewed interest in health and well-being. Such megatrends have given rise to new purpose and relevance to insurers.
Mimi: That’s very true. And we know that the insurance market operated for a long time without modern digital platforms or taking advantage of cloud and AI.
To service a radically changing market, Infosys has developed an innovative insurance platform. Could you give us some information on NGIN?
Baskar: That is a great question, Mimi. As far as I know, there has been very little focus to build a new insurance platform in the last decade or so. We have seen efforts towards mostly modernizing existing ones.
We at Infosys McCamish, saw this as an opportune moment to take advantage of the paradigm shift in the technology landscape, specifically the API economy and cloud, to build an evolutionary insurance platform. It is called Infosys McCamish NGIN, which is a single, go-to platform, with functionalities across all life insurance products and services.
The core functions of NGIN include product setup, new business, billing and collection, claims, accounting, and policy servicing. NGIN is built on a state-of-the-art architecture and design, reviewed by renowned architects, and leverages open-source technologies. It has been built with the single purpose of empowering business users with superior user experience and supporting IT for enhanced operations; it’s also highly configurable and extensible.
NGIN is a cloud native and ready platform. It is available to our clients in three engagement models - licensing model, software as a service (SaaS), and through our proven model of digital third-party administration (TPA), which includes business operations.
In fact, the platform recently won the international design award “iF Design Award 2023” in the “User Experience for Insurance Platform” category.
Mimi: I agree, flexibility is extremely important in client engagements. I understand the NGIN platform brings several key benefits to insurance players worldwide.
Could you elaborate on the various advantages of implementing the NGIN platform?
Baskar: Sure, Mimi.
NGIN is designed and developed to deliver significant business benefits to insurance carriers. I will mention some of the notable benefits now:
- 75-80% faster launching of new products and product variants to the market, thus helping carriers gain market share.
- Nimbleness and responsiveness across pre-configured insurance processes.
- 100% configurability to address straight-through processing (STP) of service requests.
- Operational efficiencies at scale leading to savings in cost of operations.
- Superior user experience design coupled with guided transaction processing, enabling associates to learn insurance processes faster.
- Micro services-based modular design and architecture, simplifying the IT landscape and providing high value delivery.
Mimi: Those are some solid benefits, Baskar. Thank you so much for coming to our podcast today and giving your valuable insights on the life insurance market and NGIN.
Baskar:It was a pleasure, Mimi. Looking forward for more.
Mimi:
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