Modernization in the Insurance Industry

Platform modernization is an increasing priority for insurers, particularly those tenure insurers that have a legacy portfolio of applications, and the reason for this is at a bare minimum, software and operating system currency is a real risk from an end of life as well as vulnerability implication. Making sure the applications are current from that base level is important for all insurers. Some of these insurance carriers go back 100 plus years and not and while their technology is not quite 100 years old, it’s pretty dated, so that’s a challenge. Mainframe and COBOL are still in play with some of these insurers and those are hard to move off of. It’s an interesting challenge to modernize on very, very old and very rigid tech stacks.

The Opportunity: Vast Customer Data

I think the opportunity, and what’s really interesting for insurers, is data. They happen to have a tremendous amount of information and data on their customers and that is a huge asset for them. The ability to get at that information and put it to productive use is what is a great opportunity for insurers. Not only to continue to offer great products and services to their customers but to innovate and move the industry forward in exciting ways; to bring new products, prices, services to their customers in a way that hasn’t been experienced before.

The Benefit: Agility and Innovation

One of the number one benefits of platform modernization from my perspective, especially for those insurers who are going to take a more progressive and perhaps aggressive approach on re-architecting and rewriting core business applications, is really to introduce more nimble and service-oriented architecture type models. This is so their business logic and their data can be increasingly accessible, not only for the need of that particular business function but for future needs that perhaps we can’t even think of now. The ability to get that business logic and more importantly data going forward is key for innovation.