Digital is the new market force that is driving massive disruption in consumer expectations. It is requiring a different set of skills, processes, culture, and metrics. Several industries have already started their digital path; it’s time for insurers to respond to this transformation.

In the previous article, we highlighted the top challenges for insurers in the modernization process: adapting to a new digital landscape presents many difficulties for them, due to their legacy infrastructure, and a surprising number of insurers have no clear business case for digital. The first barrier to digital transformation is a lack of a clear scope of work. The challenge for CEOs and executives is understanding how to change and transform their businesses.

A digital transformation must be driven from the core of the company and requires leadership. Leaders, already pushing for cross-functional collaboration and shifts in the corporate ecosystem, are having to find innovative ways to foster the technical side of transformation, as well as the business culture itself. Generally speaking, the transformation requires new digital talents, new metrics and measures, and new ways to work that value speed and impact. It also requires a new business model, with a focus on generating better customer outcomes. The Belgian Insurance market must be ready for the new wave of productivity.

Therefore, what do you need to become a digital change leader?

A common distribution model in insurance is B2B2C, in which consumers are mainly served via intermediaries such as agents, brokers, and banks. These intermediaries play an important role for insurers in servicing end consumers. This B2B2C model is the dominant model in the Belgian insurance market – currently 78% of customers in Belgium are served this way.

Most Belgian customers choose their insurance carrier based on the recommendation of the intermediaries, and they have greater loyalty to the intermediaries than to the insurance carriers. For their part, the intermediaries develop a trusted relationship with their customers. ⁽¹⁾

Within this model, the information plays a key role, as well sharing and integrating that information is vital in support of the various stakeholders and in speeding up time-to-market.

As per the triangular model of the insurance distribution, there are several different types of documents interactions:

• Interaction with consumers: documents, email, social media, web forms, telephone calls…
• Interactions with intermediary: dossiers, policy, claims, video, forms…
• Internal governance: reports, risk models, compliance and audit reports…

Digital insurers connect Content, Process, and People (IBM). Digital capabilities must enable every part of the business to improve efficiencies, rapidly respond to new opportunities, and support the evolving needs of customers, partners, employees, and other parties.

In 2017, Alfresco in association with Forbes provided a view of just some of the ways Digital Leaders are thinking differently. Digital transformation requires organizations to rethink the way they leverage information technology, applying the principles of design, open and platform thinking to achieve success.

Alfresco is an enterprise open-source software company focused on advancing the flow of digital business. The company provides a better, more effortless way for people to work, making sure they have the information they need, exactly when they need it most. In the insurance market, the Alfresco Digital Business Platform is used to digitize processes, manage content, and securely govern information, with a particular focus on underwriting, applications processing, claims processing, and customer communication.

Belgian insurers, such us Ethias, P&V Group, and Credendo, have chosen Alfresco and Xenit, as first pillars to modernize their process. For those companies, it was hard to become digital, when the core of their business remained resolutely analog. What’s more, many insurers are saddled with inflexible, disconnected systems that slow or break down information flows. These legacy systems don’t support the digitization initiatives that enable modern ways of working and first-rate customer interactions (Alfresco | Re-imagining the Insurance Customer’s Journey).

The Alfresco Digital Business Platform complements and extends core insurance systems to enhance digital capabilities across the policy life-cycle.  

To become digital change leaders, our customers applied the following best practices: 

• Setting goals and executing their strategies
• Putting people at the center of the modernization process, using a design thinking approach
• Innovating using an open collaboration approach allows for seamless integration with new technologies & services
• Using a platform strategy to harness the power and scale of their digital capabilities and as a result, are able to quickly deploy new digital initiatives. 

_{(1) Digital Innovation in the Belgian Insurance Market}