Accelerating Innovation in Insurance with a No-Code Platform

No-code can help insurers keep up with demand and improve their service delivery models, all without sacrificing quality. Here’s how.

The Amazon Effect has revolutionized how businesses operate in a new global market, and property and casualty (P&C) insurance companies are no exception. Today’s consumers—predominantly tech-savvy, well-connected, and accustomed to instant gratification—have incredibly high consumer expectations. They want newer, better services, faster and without interruption.

To keep up with these standards, agents and channels have worked hard to harness technological advances like the IoT and use them to fuel the multi-channel digital services that consumers want. Making this transition has been easier for incumbents and startups, but many P&C companies still lag behind. A no-code enterprise application development platform can help insurers gain a competitive advantage, drive innovation, and offer their customers high-quality products as quickly as possible.

The State of P&C 

In addition to external pressures, property and casualty insurance companies have a difficult time innovating for two major reasons: organizational barriers and IT challenges. The top six internal obstacles that hinder change and limit innovation are:

1. Department silos: The deep divide between the business and IT departments slows down existing projects and critically limits the free flow of ideas.
2. Legacy IT and technical debt: Outdated technologies aren’t scalable, adaptable, or extensible, and they cost a fortune to maintain.
3. Innovation authority: Innovation should begin from the top-down, but many leaders don’t have the budget or authority to make change happen.
4. Status quo: The insurance industry has been operating in the same way for a long time, and many insurers lack the motivation to shake things up.
5. Emphasis on subject matter expertise: When insurers prioritize certain knowledge bases over ingenuity and entrepreneurship, they inadvertently stunt innovation. 
6. Evangelism: Unfortunately, leaders and their innovations are often relegated to the margins.

Innovation starts from within, but innovators often don’t have the support they need to break new ground due to these organizational barriers.

From a technical standpoint, insurers are spending a lot of money on technology, but those investments haven’t translated into true innovation. So far in 2020, enterprises have spent $565 billion (out of a $1 trillion global software budget) on off-the-shelf software, middleware, and legacy operating systems. When these funds go toward disparate technologies and the maintenance of manual processes, enterprises continually run into issues with project backlogs, huge legacy costs, and difficult integrations. The other $550 billion of the budget that gets devoted to custom software doesn’t fare much better—93% of enterprise IT projects valued at over $10 million fail to deliver.

How Can Insurers Adapt?

Insurance companies are in a challenging place right now, but there are plenty of opportunities to turn things around. In order to provide a higher quality of service to customers, remain competitive in a crowded marketplace, and prioritize innovation, insurers must transform holistically across these six subject areas:

1. Strategy ambition: Are the investments in my innovation portfolio mostly incremental? Is my enterprise creating options that could drive at least 15% of new revenue?  
2. Business model: Is my current business model adaptable enough for current market conditions? Can I turn on a dime?
3. Technology: Is my current technology preventing me from innovating and keeping up with the market? Is my current infrastructure scalable enough to support the latest cloud-based platforms, microservices, and APIs? Am I paying too much for services that aren’t giving me the results I need?
4. Culture and talent: Are my employees pushing the envelope or maintaining the status quo? Does my enterprise naturally attract digital natives who bring new ways of thinking and working?
5. Competition: Where do I rank against my competitors? Is my business at risk if their adoption accelerates?
6. Cost structure: Are there opportunities to deliver the same or higher quality of service at significantly lower costs? Am I using my resources as effectively as possible?

Answering these questions will give you a clearer understanding of where you stand in terms of innovation and point you toward areas of improvement. Also consider partnering with leaders in InsurTech who will lend their expertise to help you grow, rather than simply guiding you to various solutions.

An InsurTech partner can help you create an operating model that facilitates innovation internally and challenges your enterprise to be more agile. Promote a value-driven innovation approach with measurable goals, benchmarks, and rewards. It’s important to aim to transform holistically across all dimensions of innovation, not just technology.

The No-Code Solution

When it comes to technology, only no-code can help insurance companies innovate at scale. A no-code solution can solve insurers’ biggest pain points—technical advancement and market dynamics—by making software development an entirely visual process. Programmers can configure a wide variety of complex applications on the Unqork no-code platform without writing a single line of code. The application that you create runs directly from the visual logic, and no-code base is required to export the app or push it into production.

The explosion of microservices and APIs have created the era of “plug-and-play” in the enterprise. No-code helps enterprises keep up with technological advancements via drag-and-drop visual components that allow developers to build sophisticated applications that bypass legacy technology in record time. This dramatically increases speed to market and ensures that your insurance enterprise spends less time building and more time earning revenue. Apps built with no-code are also easily integrated with the cloud, which unlocks a host of innovative capabilities and access to upgrades.

No-code also helps enterprises find innovative solutions during the IT skills shortage. As the global demand for talented developers increases while supply decreases, enterprises find themselves pressured to find talent. Since no-code makes it possible for anyone to design complex applications, enterprises should no longer be forced to outsource talent—they can cultivate it in-house. Not only does this shine a light on the untapped potential within your organization, but it also cuts down on costs and allows you to affect change faster.

The results? Accelerated speed to market, improved quality, and lower total cost of ownership. The time for no-code in the property and casualty insurance industry is now, from claims administrations to shared services. To dig a little deeper into how no-code drives innovation, check out the full webinar with Nilay Doshi, our Head of Property and Casualty Insurance.