“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” right?
Ermmm… sort of.
Protection insurers are weary of migrating customer records to a new system — and for good reason. It’s a highly complex undertaking.
It’s no wonder the market as a whole has preferred plug-in technology solutions over full-on core system upgrades, especially since many insurtechs that offer the former can yield a decent ROI fairly quickly.
Though surface-level solutions have served as more palatable alternatives than complete tech overhauls, their days are numbered.
Soon, insurers who’ve relied on these more turn-key solutions will need to fundamentally change their tech stacks. Though intimidating, insurers who upgrade their core systems will be better off in the long run.
Insurers Are Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Multiple modern legacy systems in the protection space have looming expiration dates, meanwhile fundamental technology advancements are ongoing. Together, these comorbidities deem old core systems impractical — not to mention how hard it is to find top IT talent willing to work on such outdated technology.
Insurers using end-of-life platforms find themselves between a rock and a hard place. With looming expiration dates on their systems, companies must either opt for expensive, vendor-suggested system upgrades, or go to market and nitpick the best architecture for their current and future platform needs.
This is particularly true with legacy products that sit on legacy policy systems (like old life insurance policies); there’s plenty of unique information to duplicate that can take ages if you choose the wrong vendor or architecture to move that data onto.
Taking Migration From Overwhelming to Manageable
Though you face a difficult decision, things will start falling into place once you find the right fit.
When you find vendor technology that accurately duplicates data, ingests it from multiple sources, and translates it into the formats you need, it turns overwhelming migration work into a much more manageable process.
Though it seems like a big undertaking, getting the future-proof agility many protection insurers crave doesn’t require an all-or-nothing approach. Greenfield projects on cloud-native architecture let you spin up and sell new, market-adaptable products while you migrate piece by piece onto the new system in the background.
When you transition to coretech that’s cloud-native, customer-centric, and has scale-based agility powered by its microservices architecture, you start to yield an even bigger ROI than any insurtech solution could give you. With the right tech, you can expect better data exchanges, smarter automations, better underwriting, automated fraud detection, and more robust product packages that make for a significantly lower cost per policy. Together, these factors significantly shrink total cost of ownership (TCO) and tech debt over time.
Big Changes for Bigger Results
Your platform’s looming expiration may call for some tough decision making, but it might just be the catalyst to some game-changing upgrades for your business.
Take this opportunity to vet your options and select the one that serves both your current and future needs.
Read our comprehensive market overview to learn how you can achieve future-proof agility in spite of what seems like a complex migration.
