The Power of Together: Creating a Partner Ecosystem

In a global survey we commissioned last year of insurance and reinsurance executives, upgrading technology was voted the number one concern for senior industry professionals. This result is reflected in the conversations I have with my peers in the insurance industry.

We are beyond the point of discussing if and where technology fits in the insurance landscape. The challenge for most insurers and reinsurers is whether to develop bespoke InsurTech solutions within their own business, or to partner with an external expert provider.

Whether companies want to be ahead of the game or are simply anxious about being left behind, all sectors of the market are taking InsurTech seriously. However, as a strategy to get their businesses up to date with the latest InsurTech developments, our survey showed that only one-third of the respondents are developing initiatives in-house, while more than half are not. 

When you consider how long it takes to build, sell and implement core systems in our industry, the early adopters are generally running code that’s more than a decade old. Many seasoned CIOs that have been through the cycle on a few occasions are implementation weary, which is understandable. In the past, quite a few transformational projects involved ripping and replacing huge swathes of technology with digital services that were neither strategic nor aligned to business goals. 

For any organisation with an IT transformation project on their agenda, any change, regardless of size, calls for significant operational, business and strategic realignment, including cultural changes and the way things are done on a day-to-day basis. Embracing the digital era does not have to be painful. Technology now exists to make this whole process a lot easier, and to be fully aligned to business objectives.

Our digital vision at AdvantageGo is to augment our insurance platform of core products -Exact, Acumen, and Navigator - with a comprehensive range of cloud-based Microservices. These system-agnostic Microservices, designed to plug into any system or platform, not just our own, provide curated knowledge to distil powerful and personalised insights on topics such as peril and events so underwriters can make better-informed decisions straight away.

Our Microservices strategy allows us to directly respond to carriers’ demands to have real-time information at their fingertips to help them bring new products quicker to market, price more effectively and access data and reports on an immediate basis.

Navigator, our underwriting, policy and claims management software is a powerful tool on its own. However, Navigator with Acumen (our market-leading insurance analytics solution) at its heart and augmented by our Microservices creates a powerhouse solution. The Sanctions screening microservice has recently been integrated into Navigator’s Party module and if you want to find out more about why insurers should be concerned about sanctions, read our blog, Sanctions: How robust is your business compliance process?

Insurers who use our products together derive added value by their seamless interconnectivity, a hallmark of our digital ecosystem.  

Two is better than one

I often compare technology to an orchestra, a lot of moving parts that when working in harmony create something of beauty and power. A single instrument, well-played, is wonderful, an orchestra playing in a symphony is on another level.

As technology vendors, we are the musicians, our software and solutions our instruments, but we deliver better in partnership than alone. 

To deliver these Microservices, we partner with leading data providers to offer a multi-tenant insurance platform that caters to any part of the insurance business where insurers can benefit from easy access to a broad range of products.

Our partners, experts in their field, have been chosen because they share the same values and standards that we apply to our own business.

We have an ongoing commitment and intention to grow and expand our partner ecosystem to add value to our core offerings. This strategy provides us with an opportunity to bring data partners on board that we can potentially augment and add value to ourselves.  Our aspiration is to leverage the newly acquired data from our partners, mesh it together with our customers´ more traditional data from their core operational systems and use some of the more recent developments in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to drive insightful intelligence through our solutions to assist better decision making.

So, instead of having to contract with numerous suppliers, any insurer can easily come onto our platform and we will provide the required functionality and data they are looking for.

New Microservice - New Partner

We continue to expand our ecosystem of partners with the recent addition of OANDA, a global leader in online multi-asset trading services and currency data and analytics. Our new Microservice, ‘Currency Service’, delivers real-time currency exchange data to insurers to reduce currency exposure and enhance risk mitigation capabilities.

Partnering with the leading provider of real-time FX data will allow us to create cases aimed specifically to meet the needs of customers in the commercial insurance market. Currency Service utilises OANDA´s Exchange Rates API Connector to retrieve currency exchange data instantaneously. Through a standard interface, subscribers can obtain real-time exchange rates for over 200 currencies sourced from OANDA’s proprietary platform that processes billions of transactions daily. As a market maker, OANDA is able to provide FX data from all major participants in the interbank market, offering rates with the highest degree of accuracy.

Our partnership with OANDA combines their expertise with our flexible and functionally-rich core solutions to deliver pioneering tools to help insurers and reinsurers to quickly reduce costs and proactively manage risk.

We are delighted to bring OANDA on board and we look forward to recruiting new and leading service providers to our set of Microservices.

Resources

• AdvantageGo Microservices