An Open Letter to a Property & Casualty Insurer

Dear Insurer,

This letter is to acknowledge your challenges, in particular, your technological challenges.

Generally speaking, we suspect those challenges are operational efficiency, the experience of your agents and policyholders in working with you, and risk management. While we’re not saying all these things are true for you, there are several specific challenges that are common to companies like yours.

Many of your peers rely on outdated legacy systems, some decades old, that hinder agility and make the integration with modern technologies more difficult. They’re costly to maintain, inefficient, and don’t support real-time data processing or advanced analytics. If time is money, so is inefficiency.

You and your peers collect vast amounts of data — from claims, underwriting, customer interactions, et al. — but siloed data systems and inconsistent data quality limit your ability to use that data beneficially. Since insurance is a data business, that’s an expensive liability.

Speaking of liability, with increasing digitization, you and your peers face increasing pressure to keep private data secure. Protecting that data while complying with ever-changing regulatory mandates can leave you vulnerable to non-compliance penalties — and worse — especially as cloud-based systems become more prevalent.

AI and machine learning can improve your underwriting, your claims processing, and your fraud-detection capabilities. But many of your peers lack the necessary talent to implement those capabilities, integrate AI with existing workflows, and to address concerns like bias in AI-driven decisions.

You’ve probably noticed customer expectations never diminish. Agents and policyholders increasingly demand responsive digital experiences from things like mobile apps and self-service portals. You have to balance user-friendliness with personalization and privacy. And there may be no greater technological challenge than meeting or exceeding those expectations while keeping up with evolving regulations and compliance issues around data usage, the reliability of machine learning, and AI transparency.

The dirty little secret is it’s all about aligning your technology investments with customer and compliance demands while maintaining cost-efficiency. But we don’t want to put that in writing.

If you have questions, we’re here to answer them. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

The MapleTech Team