Technology: The Insurance Industry's Pivot Point

The insurance industry is wrestling with how to interact with and retain customers in an effort to drive growth and profitability. Three innovative technologies—social networking, telematics, and SOA—are essential to companies that want to be industry leaders.

Across the insurance industry, companies are adopting similar and consistent business strategies as they seek new ways to grow and prosper. Many of the strategies seek to improve the richness and effectiveness of interactions with customers, which today increasingly have a technology component. Social networking, telematics and service-oriented architectures (SOA) are all in the mix and driving this transformation. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube—to name three—offer the ability to improve customer interactions, communicate product information and generate more sales. Telematics may be larger still, as it introduces entirely new business models that blend insurance, technology and mobility. SOA is becoming key to managing the complexity of integrating legacy and new applications.

A.T. Kearney recently completed a study of emerging technologies to isolate opportunities for capturing strategic advantage. These trends in insurance are part of a broader landscape in which innovative technologies are significantly driving change across a wide range of functions and industries. Figure 1 highlights the main trends in five areas: consumer and employee experience (leading to innovation breakthroughs), applications and telecommunications (leading to growth and profits), and information management (leading to improved operations).