Business process automations provide immense opportunities for improvements as ever and more so when there is pressure both inside and outside an organization as is the case in the insurance sector that infuse new ways of doing business and continually challenge traditional ways.  Some of these trends can be seen with examples, such as, when Lemonade has streamlined the claims experience by using AI and chatbots, Ethos issues life insurance policies in minutes, Hippo issues home quotes in under a minute, Telematics based auto insurance companies like Metromile and Root offer usage based insurance, Fabric offers value-added services in its niche market, Figo Pet empowers a completely digital pet insurance platform and Next Insurance simplifies small business insurance with a 100% online experience. In this sector, incumbent insurers have insufficient customer-centric strategies and while the establishment view the niche product from these incumbents as merely threats, they run the risk of increasing their debt with their outdated processes and practices which results in lower benefits to cost ratio. The gap also widens between the strategies offered by the incumbents and those provided by the established. Incumbents channel technology best practices and are not bound by industry traditions. Zero-touch processing, self-service and chatbots are deployed to improve customer -centric offerings. Industry trends are also pushing customers more and more to digital channels. The net result is that the business is increasingly driven towards digital-enabled omnichannel, and customer-aligned customer experience and established business have the advantage to strive for scale. This is evident from the increased engagement with digital leaders from inside and outside the industry and with the new and improved portfolio of digital offerings.

A digital transformation leader sees the opportunities and challenges for these business initiatives with a different point of view. It can be broken down into legacy and new business capabilities and with different approaches to tackle them. While established companies in this sector have already embraced the undisputed use of cloud technologies and have even met a few milestones on their cloud adoption roadmap, digital leaders increasingly face the challenges of migrating and modernizing legacy applications both for transactional processing as well as analytical reports. The journey towards the cloud has been anything but steady due to the diverse technological stack involved in these applications. A single application can be upwards of a hundred thousand lines of code and many can be considered boutique or esoteric in terms of their use of third-party statistical software and libraries. What use to be streamlined and tuned analytical queries against data warehouses, has continually evolved to using Big Data and stream analytics software often with home-grown applications or internal facing automations.