How Business-Building and Innovative Technology is Shaping The Future of Insurance

Ari Libarikian (Senior Partner & Global Leader, Leap by McKinsey) & Bassam Chaptini (CTO, Unqork) discuss how leading enterprises leverage business building to innovate & stay ahead of competitors.

At the recent Unqork Create conference, Bassam Chaptini, the CTO of Unqork had a virtual discussion with Ari Libarikian, Senior Partner & Global Leader, Leap by McKinsey. The two discussed the challenges and potential of transformation in the insurance space. 

Leap by McKinsey “works with established organizations to imagine, build, and scale new businesses—and develop the capabilities needed to do it again and again.” While transformation and innovation is an ongoing priority for all enterprises, the disruptions of the past two years have accelerated these plans. 

“Companies had to go through dramatic changes in digital and technology in a very short period of time, there was no longer the option and the five-year plan. They have to get it done very quickly because customer needs changed,” Ari explained. “In the beginning of 2020, customer interaction models changed almost overnight.”

Transformation is, of course, about far more than automating a process or two. Today’s enterprise ecosystems are complex and sprawling, linking workflows across custom solutions, legacy systems, and external third-party services. “Integration is the 800-pound gorilla here, right? You can’t get away without some degree of integration back into the core. And that becomes a project in and of itself,” said Ari. 

“Companies had to go through dramatic changes in digital and technology in a very short period of time, there was no longer the option and the five-year plan. They have to get it done very quickly because customer needs changed.”

While transformation is challenging, Ari and Bassam agreed that “insurance is one of those industries with the biggest upside from reinvention. It’s sitting on a ton of data. It has a product that gets simpler each year and therefore more-easily bought through digital channels and apps and the like,” Ari continued. The question becomes if insurance companies can “pivot from repair-and-replace, which is old-school insurance, to predict-and-prevent. Can you leverage new sources of data … to provide better services? Can you create technologies that are much more nimble and that are updated on a weekly basis or a daily basis in terms of the features and the functionalities that your agents or your customers see that allow you to be much more customer-friendly and meet the needs of the customer?”

Watch the video above to listen to the discussion in full.