Modernization blueprint for Insurers

Digital platforms for insurers: Four key components to address insurers' key business goals

The insurance industry is grappling with rising costs, legacy systems, stringent regulations, shifting customer expectations post-pandemic, and increasing competition from digital-first companies, all of which are impacting key metrics like expense ratios, profitability, and market share. Insurers are also caught between the demands of rapid digital transformation and the rigid constraints of legacy systems. 

To meet both bottom-line goals (reducing operational costs) and top-line goals (enhancing digital sales and speed to market ), it’s crucial to adopt a digital platform-based approach comprised of all four platforms - business, customer experience, engineering, and data platform together, that will help insurers to streamline operations, improve customer engagement, enhance data-driven decision-making, and increase business agility.

Current business and technology challenges

Insurance companies are grappling with the following key issues:
 

• Duplicated efforts across channels and products: Insurers often build the same product multiple times for different sales channels, leading to wasted effort and higher costs. This fragmentation makes it harder to create modular, reusable product components, slowing down innovation.
  
  
• Inconsistent customer experience: Due to disconnected systems and a lack of integrated touchpoints, customers often face inconsistent journeys when switching between channels (such as mobile apps, agents, and websites), leading to frustration and drop-offs in digital sales.

• Long product launch cycles: Without modern engineering practices like CI/CD pipelines and automated testing and legacy systems, feature rollouts become lengthy and error-prone, preventing insurers from quickly adapting to customer demands or regulatory changes.
  
  
• Siloed data and limited experimentation: Insurers often store data in silos, preventing them from gaining a unified view of the customer. This limits their ability to personalize offerings, optimize customer interactions, or test new product features effectively.

The solution: Four key platforms for insurance digital platform strategy

To overcome these challenges, insurers need to embrace a digital platform strategy built around four key pillars: customer experience, business agility, data management, and modern engineering practices. These platforms can transform how insurers operate, innovate, and engage with customers.

1. Customer experience platform: Provide a unified customer experience addressing all personas

A unified engagement layer is vital for insurers aiming to deliver a seamless and consistent experience across both digital and physical channels, such as online policy management through portals and apps, and agent-assisted services. This platform enables both policyholders and agents to interact with insurance products in a way that is intuitive, personalized, and proactive. Leveraging customer data for tailored insurance offerings, it facilitates omnichannel integration, allowing clients to easily switch between digital platforms (like mobile apps) and in-person support. By orchestrating customer journeys—whether filing claims, updating policies, or purchasing new coverage—this layer ensures consistent touchpoints. Real-time feedback loops help optimize these experiences, leading to higher customer satisfaction, reduced policyholder churn, and greater cross-selling and upselling opportunities within the insurer’s product portfolio.

For example, a customer trying to file a claim online might be directed to call a customer service representative or agent, only to find that the representative/agent needs the same information that was already provided online. A representative having access to the information provided via a different channel creates a much less frustrating experience for the customer, by avoiding duplicated effort. This cohesive experience improves customer satisfaction and loyalty, increasing digital sales and reducing operational costs by limiting redundant inquiries.

2. Business platform: Launch products quicker using a capability catalog approach

To accelerate product innovation and reduce time to market, insurers should adopt a business platform built around reusable capabilities - cross-functional building blocks that can be applied across various insurance products, such as quote generation, premium collection, and claim disbursement. Capabilities are developed and added into the capability catalog, where they can be reused via rewiring across customer journeys, evolved, and maintained as per capability archetype in the product life cycle. By leveraging a modular, microservices-based architecture, insurers can rapidly launch new products and features with minimal manual intervention.

For example, consider an insurer that starts with a car insurance product sales journey. By building the core foundational capabilities of quote generation, premium collection, and application form filling, car models catalog as reusable components, they can significantly reduce the time required to launch a new product like e-scooter insurance. These capabilities can be reused and evolved in the product lifecycle, allowing for faster product development and reduced costs.

3. Data platform: Unlock the potential of data for customer and internal business processes

Data is the backbone of any insurer’s ability to personalize services and make informed decisions. A data platform helps eliminate silos and enables real-time access to unified, high-quality data. By adhering to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, this platform ensures customer data is consistently available and usable across the entire organization, enhancing both business processes and customer interactions.

This data-driven approach not only improves decision-making (such as risk assessments or fraud detection) but also powers personalized insurance products. For example, a more unified data environment could enable insurers to dynamically adjust premiums based on real-time customer behavior, driving both loyalty and profitability.

4. Engineering platform: Build capabilities and deliver business value faster

Operational efficiency remains a significant concern for insurers, particularly when it comes to the engineering teams responsible for product development. Without a structured engineering platform, much of the team’s time is spent on non-value-added tasks such as manual testing and maintenance, leading to burnout and slower time to market.

An effective Engineering Platform automates these routine processes, allowing teams to focus on innovation. By implementing CI/CD pipelines, test automation, and cloud-native technologies, insurers can significantly reduce the time required to roll out new features and ensure higher quality, with fewer errors and reduced downtime.

The path forward: Building thin-sliced solutions

To fully embrace digital platforms, insurers should start by creating thin slices across all key areas of the platforms - customer experience, business operations, data, and engineering. Rather than overhauling the entire ecosystem in one go, they can begin by incrementally deploying solutions that touch on all these platforms, enabling faster value realization and lower risk.

Take one product or one customer journey (for example - life insurance) for one channel (for example - direct channel) using a vertical slice approach, as shown in the below diagram.

1. Capability development: Build foundational capabilities across all four platforms - business, customer experience, data, and engineering platforms. Develop these capabilities with an approach that is extensible to the ecosystem, so reusability and scalability are inherently built into the design. These capabilities should be considered as lego blocks which will build the platform ecosystem.

    

2. Journeys orchestration: Create the reimagined journeys considering the customer at the center and plug the capabilities into those journeys through the orchestration framework.

    

3. Capability governance: Capabilities are identified and built as part of the product lifecycle, however, they can evolve independently. As a result, we need to create the right governance across the organization for these capabilities. Ownership, funding model, governance, documentation, roadmap - all need to be done through this governance as per the capability archetypes (org, line of business, product, engineering/technical).

    

4. Involve security and compliance at the start of the inception and keep them involved at every stage, ensuring left shift compliance and a “compliance by design” approach.

    

5. Last but not least, track the success metrics. Once these platforms are in place, insurers must define and track relevant KPIs to ensure they are delivering the expected business outcomes. By tracking these metrics, insurers can ensure they remain agile, competitive, and aligned with both customer needs and business goals.

Conclusion

In a rapidly evolving insurance landscape, digital platforms provide the foundational tools needed to meet growing demands for better customer experiences, faster product development, and more efficient operations. Insurers who embrace these platforms will not only address current challenges but also position themselves for sustained growth and innovation in the future. A unified approach across customer experience, business, data, and engineering platforms ensures scalability, agility, and the ability to deliver exceptional value to both customers and the business.