Most carriers are looking at investment in a policy administration transformation as the first step in advancing their digital agenda.

As shown in earlier parts of this article, fewer survey respondents are building a business case based on reducing IT maintenance. Instead, the focus is on increasing efficiencies, enhancing the carriers’ ability to offer new products to customers and improving the user experience.

All respondents report significant integration of policy administration systems with other systems, including claims, billing and underwriting, for example. However, not all integrations showed consistency across company size. “Underwriter desktop” was cited the most for companies with direct written premiums between $501 million and $2 billion, while “agent portal” was most integrated among companies with premiums of $500 million or less. Our experience is that both of these capabilities are key to implementing operational efficiencies and improving speed to market. They are also foundational for enabling the digital agenda.

When integrating with third-party data sources, we observe that, on average, implementations are including at least five to nine third-party data sources regardless of market segment and geography.

Based on our experience, as reliable sources of third-party data increase in number, carriers will be looking to do more of this type of integration to ease the burden of data capture and to provide more specialized and personalized services. Implementation of modern policy administration platforms makes adding data sources more feasible from an overall time and cost perspective.