An Insurance News webinar, sponsored by INSTANDA, considers whether AI is putting insurance product development back into the hands of insurers.

The on-demand discussion – From Product Idea to Market: Why Insurers Shouldn’t Pay to Implement Their Software – is moderated by Insurance News editor-in-chief John Deex and features INSTANDA’s CTO Kevin Gaut, business development head for Australia Jerry Hall and general manager Asia-Pacific Jon Moody.

The experts examine why no insurer should be paying a technology partner to implement its own software, as well as how frontier insurtech providers are already well into the journey of making this a reality.

It is a journey INSTANDA knows well, with clients around the world, including several insurers and MGAs across Asia-Pacific. Mr Gaut says a new product has been added to its platform roughly once every two days since the start of 2020, across lines ranging from retail home and motor to commercial, health and life.

Across those markets, INSTANDA says clients are adopting a familiar operating model, one where insurers retain control of product innovation, significantly reduce implementation costs, accelerate speed to market and gain the agility to respond to emerging risks and changing customer needs.

Mr Gaut says it’s not just the initial implementation, but also upgrades that must be considered.

“Why should insurers pay every few years when they want to upgrade the thing they implemented three or four or five years previously?” he said. “Increasingly, the answer is, they shouldn’t.

“Change, and their ability to [carry out] change is a core part of what insurers should be thinking about when they are implementing a piece of software.”

Mr Moody believes that, as technology develops, insurers should be able to move past traditional implementation patterns and start “controlling their own destiny”.

“If you have some Excel skills, you should be able to configure a policy admin system, so why wouldn’t you go with that process first?”

And Mr Hall believes there isn’t much stopping insurers working in that way – if the product knowledge is there and the platform is configurable.

“If you are able to skill the people in the team, give them that configuration knowledge, and then get IT to apply that discipline around it, then there is no reason why they can’t undertake that role themselves.”

He says AI can now keep a business capability model up to date, making it “the living specification, really, of the business and how it operates”.

Mr Gaut says that, from an automation perspective, AI is “more intelligent than things that we’ve had before”, but its value depends on what sits beneath it.

“You need firm foundations and positive proof points from multiple implementations to be able to trust the agility and speed that you’ll get from the front end and from the AI,” he said.