Insurers moving beyond simple service transactions to focus on customer engagement and providing greater opportunities for education: Novarica
Boston, MA (June 4, 2018) – Individual annuity carriers are facing pressures both internally within the insurance industry as competition mounts between competitors, and externally as NAIC, SEC, and individual state regulation announcements stand to instigate significant changes in the future. Carriers continue to contend with an overall decline in sales for annuities going back to 2014. Bracing for change, individual annuity carriers are prioritizing the modernization of policy administration systems, as well as improvements to agent portals, business intelligence, and risk management. In a new report, Business and Technology Trends: Individual Annuity, research and advisory firm Novarica provides an overview of individual annuity carriers’ business and technology issues, data about the marketplace, and more than 40 examples of recent technology investments by individual annuity insurers.
“Key initiatives include agent portal enhancements, business intelligence and analytics to better understand the customer base and provide superior service, core system upgrades or replacements, and implementing solutions to support hedging strategies,” writes Chris Eberly, Vice President of Research and Consulting. “Most carriers are moving beyond simple service transactions to focus on customer engagement and providing greater opportunities for education with upsell potential.”
Key findings of the report include:
- Self-service and transactional capabilities are required to manage expenses, but AI-related technologies are needed to build engagement and address projected increased producer workloads. With a push to lower fees, producers need to grow their client base to make up for lost income-but an increased compliance workload makes serving that base challenging.
- Speed to market and product design are vital for sales growth. Business intelligence and core systems investments continue to be critical in improving time to market and product flexibility.
- Carriers must be prepared for equity market shifts. Technology to support pricing, reserves, capital management, and statutory reserving are also key.
- Regulatory changes will continue to impact the annuities market in the near term. While the DOL guidelines are all but gone, additional NAIC, SEC, and state regulations will replace them.
A preview of the brief is available online.
About Novarica
Novarica helps more than 100 insurers make better decisions about technology projects and strategy through retained advisory services, published research, and strategy consulting. Its knowledge base covers trends, benchmarks, best practices, case studies, and vendor solutions. Leveraging the expertise of its senior team and more than 300 CIO Research Council members, Novarica provides clients with the ability to make faster, better, more informed decisions. Its consulting services focus on vendor selection, custom benchmarking, project checkpoints, and IT strategy. For more information, visit www.novarica.com.
Source: Novarica
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