Novarica’s recent “Business and Technology Trends: Personal Lines” report offers many insights on the future direction of the P&C insurance industry. It also emphasizes all the reasons that I’m thrilled Yodil is now part of the Duck Creek family.
The report highlights areas that the insurance industry finally is ready to embrace: self-service, business intelligence, advanced analytics, and optimized core system workflows, all of which confer an enormous competitive advantage over insurers that defer or delay on technology investments. All of which are doable today with Duck Creek.
Novarica says those strategic capabilities are critical for the P&C market—a market characterized by high transaction volumes, intense price competition, moderate growth and high levels of advertising spending, and a market that craves more direct interactions with consumers. I agree, and Duck Creek’s recent release and acquisition strategy align very closely with Novarica’s Top Priorities as described in the report, including:
- Business intelligence – Duck Creek’s acquisition of Yodil supports business intelligence, analytics, reporting, and data repository
- Agent and customer portals – Duck Creek’s acquisition of Agencyport gives us the user-facing technology to build a superior digital customer experience
- Policy administration and rating – Duck Creek’s most recent release includes the Underwriter workbench; building on our rich heritage with even better tools to get rating right
- Contemporary insurance billing systems and claims management systems that meet customer expectations for speed and personalization and business expectations for efficiency and costs
Novarica also notes that insurance distribution models are shifting. In addition to ramping up their direct response capabilities, P&C insurers are partnering with banks, workplaces, associations, and car dealers to reach potential policyholders. Duck Creek’s broad set of applications helps to address this. Duck Creek’s data insight platform was designed to support these sorts of alternative distribution channels, while the Party functionality within Insights (functionality added via Yodil) offers the ability to tie these and other parties together, even when they’re not related to a policy or claim.
For Digital Insurers, It’s All About the Data
Digital insurers require more data available more quickly – at the speed of business. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the report is its emphasis on data quality and availability. Novarica notes that the ability to move, improve, and share data throughout the organization is crucial for a multitude of purposes beyond distribution. Use cases for data include new product development, developing Internet-of-Things capabilities, and advanced underwriting capabilities, as well as to support and enhance the customer experience.
“Personal lines carriers are putting long-term data strategies into effect. Many start with a data quality initiative and focus on implementing data warehouses, operational data stores, and appropriate data marts,” Novarica says.
Duck Creek understands that data quality and availability is a hugely important consideration for digital insurers. Even more, Duck Creek understands that data quality is relative to the use to which it is being put. Data that may be OK for transaction systems may be less good for analysis, pricing, rating, etc.
Yodil was designed to conform and validate data on the way in. Duck Creek understands how vital it is that your current data projects lay a foundation for your future predictive analytics strategies, which is one great strength Yodil brought to the Duck Creek family. Once your organization begins to capitalize on business intelligence, your desire to use it in support of marketing, underwriting, claims, actuarial, and analytics activities will only increase.
Duck Creek has always had a single point of change and has now extended that to define the target for the data in the Insights product, thus enabling unprecedented speed of making high-quality, conformed data available for business intelligence and analytics.
Novarica has a unique perspective on the industry and its future, and it aligns very closely with ours. Unlike many newcomers to the insurance technology space, Duck Creek has both the industry experience and the technological expertise necessary to do more than survive the disruption the P&C market is undergoing. We have a product strategy designed to help you thrive in it. And we’re delivering those capabilities in months – not years.
