Modernize insurance with AWS Marketplace

The pace of change in the insurance industry is increasing, often driven by forces outside of the industry. Generational shifts in customer interaction preferences are creating opportunities for new digital channels and products. The analysis of these digital interactions contributes to greater customer insight and new approaches. Broader data sets, featuring more external and unstructured data, are improving insurers’ abilities to identify price risks in future products.

But the promise of these innovations can be hard for many insurers to realize. Burdensome and rigid legacy infrastructures, change-averse cultures, aging data models, slim margins, and increasing regulatory oversight are tempering the speed of innovation.

In a recent webinar titled Modernize insurance through AWS Marketplace, industry leaders discuss the opportunities and challenges facing insurance modernization. I’m the Global Insurance Core Systems Lead at AWS, and I led this webinar. In it, I highlighted success stories featuring solutions available in AWS Marketplace. Industry experts from Generali Thailand, an insurance firm, and C2L BIZ Solutions Pvt. Ltd., an insurance technology firm, joined me.

Enabling digital transformation and innovation: Modernize insurance with AWS Marketplace

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AWS Marketplace are helping to address the changing needs of the insurance industry. The cloud can enable transformation and innovation across the board. In this post, I summarize the webinar discussion and provide perspective about data center and core system transformation and how real innovation is gaining traction.  

Data center transformation drives business outcomes

With data center transformation being a very common starting point, insurers are still at various stages of migrating their core systems and data to the cloud. As part of the migration, insurers can focus on key business outcomes, such as:

• Providing enhanced agility through a scalable cloud-based infrastructure, including partner solutions
• Enhancing customer outcomes and lowering costs with workflow efficiencies
• Retiring technical debt by moving away from legacy systems.

Solutions that enable innovation

As insurers gain cloud expertise and begin to experience the advantages of cloud computing, their focus often moves to further enabling innovation. New digital channels like chatbots or personalization engines are examples of in-demand innovations that can drive customer engagement.

Another area of innovation is the incorporation of cloud-based data lakes in an insurer’s data portfolio. Data lakes are critical in liberating internal, structured data from legacy systems for analysis. They’re equally critical in enriching that liberated data with external, often unstructured data.

Once data resides in a data lake, it becomes an accessible target for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services. Insurance providers and vendors are building models with transformative capabilities across all areas of the industry. For example, image recognition services enable automatic adjustments of vehicle damage. AI services drive claim handling and fraud detection in areas such as workers compensation.

All of these innovation-enabling solution areas—digital channels, data lakes, AI/ML—complement one another. Digital channel interactions can be analyzed for signals, which leads to greater customer insights, which, in turn, produces better products and processes.

Generali Thailand modernizes product delivery with the help of C2L BIZ

Generali Thailand is an insurance firm that provides a comprehensive range of life and property/casualty insurance products to individual and corporate clients. The firm sells its products through external bank and sales partners, as well as through internal channels.

Like many organizations across many industries, Generali Thailand’s modernization journey sped up dramatically with the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time of immense disruption, Thai banks that were previously resistant to digitalization were suddenly receptive. As these banks invested in new digital platforms, they requested that Generali Thailand sell its insurance products through those platforms.

According to HyunSook Ji, Chief Information Officer at Generali Thailand, the company needed a product platform that was reusable and flexible. “It needed to be able to respond to all requests, whether from the customer, the seller, or a partners’ platform,” she explains in the webinar.

C2L BIZ brings flexibility and reusability to Generali Thailand’s sales journey

Generali Thailand turned to C2L BIZ Solutions Pvt. Ltd. for help with its new product platform. C2L BIZ Solutions is an insurance technology company in AWS Marketplace that offers products focused on digital sales, distribution compensation management, underwriting, and claims management.

“Our SymbioSys suite of products has helped [Generali Thailand] in their digital journey,” says Mandar Tirodkar, Product Head and Chief Architect at C2L BIZ Solutions. Generali Thailand uses C2L BIZ’s SymbioSys Product Configurator and SymbioSys Sales Tool, both available in AWS Marketplace, to power its omnichannel sales capabilities.

SymbioSys Product Configurator enables Generali Thailand to quickly launch new products. Its rule engine stores configurations and calculations that adapt underwriting rules, policy documents, premiums, and other validations to the varying needs of Generali Thailand’s partners.

SymbioSys Sales Tool provides Generali Thailand with a user interface that spans the entire sales journey, along with APIs that support varying levels of partner integration. Generali Thailand’s partners can opt to deploy the user interface in its entirety or integrate only portions of it into their platforms. Partners can also use the provided APIs to transparently integrate Generali Thailand’s product functionality into their own user interfaces.

Faster speed to market with no vendor dependency

With so little coding required, Generali Thailand’s product delivery time is dramatically shorter than before. Speed to market is important in an industry with fast-changing interest rates and competitive products. The insurance provider has increased capacity using the solutions C2L BIZ offers in AWS Marketplace.

And as Mandar Tirodkar is quick to point out, these benefits come with no vendor dependency. “The Generali Thailand team uses our product configurators to independently configure and launch products,” he elaborates near the end of the webinar. With this autonomy, Generali Thailand is free to innovate at its own pace.

What is AWS Marketplace?

AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalog that makes it easy for customers to find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software, services, and data. AWS Marketplace offers quick, easy, and secure deployment, flexible consumption and contract models, and streamlined procurement and billing operations. More than 330,000 organizations large and small use AWS Marketplace monthly to accelerate digital transformation and improve efficiencies across their enterprises.

Independent research from Forrester shows it takes around half the time to find, buy, and deploy a solution through AWS Marketplace compared to other sales channels.

Conclusion and next steps

In this post, I showed how Generali Thailand deployed C2L BIZ from AWS Marketplace to launch new products faster and modernize its product delivery. To learn more about insurance modernization solutions in AWS Marketplace, visit Financial services solutions in AWS Marketplace. To learn more about the topics and solutions discussed in this blog post, and hear additional case studies, watch Modernize insurance through AWS Marketplace.

About the author

Terry Buechner is the Global Insurance Core Systems Lead for AWS. He has been with AWS since 2019, prior to which he ran the digital consulting practice at insurance software vendor Majesco. Before that, Terry spent 12 years as part of the insurance consulting team at IBM, five of which were in Japan, and two in Latin America. He lives with family in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where he is a volunteer firefighter.