If the future of insurance is all about offering excellent customer experiences, let’s give the people who know them best the tools to test, learn, and deliver.

As enterprise software evolves from cloud-hosted to cloud-native architectures, systems deployed even a few years ago will need to be replaced to support innovation, speed-to-market, and increasingly sophisticated expectations around customer experience.

Like my MacBook Air, many insurance core systems look modern and deliver on today's requirements. But their replacements are already emerging, and serious buyers are right to question their short-term viability.

For nearly a decade, insurers have assumed that digital transformation required massive core systems replacement projects. But new ways of thinking have emerged among insurers that want to deliver digital customer experiences and transform their processes and culture without all the drama.

COVID-19 has made insurance carriers, benefits providers, and brokerage firms more certain of the importance of digital transformation and forced others to re-evaluate their current digital capabilities

Against the backdrop of a global pandemic, insurers are doubling down on their commitments to digital transformation. Robert Mulligan, president and CEO of Renaissance Life and Health Insurance Company of America, and Guardian Group’s technology leader for product and claims Chip Bunker participated in a discussion led by Mike Connor, CEO and co-founder of the Silicon Valley Insurance Accelerator, and facilitated by EIS EVP of worldwide professional services Jim Caruso.

Once safely isolated from the digital transformation of insurance, the global pandemic is forcing dental insurers to swallow a lot of change all at once.

With coretech, cloud, and continuous integration/continuous delivery, the days of disruptive updates to insurance core systems are in the rearview.

As insurers look to form sustainable and scalable ecosystems, they’ll need to expose their products, rules, and rates to other systems of engagement. But are incumbent systems up to the challenge?

Insurtech’s promise was that it would support innovation through contemporary customer experiences and emerging business models. The truth is that insurtechs are just one part of diverse insurance ecosystems and require something more than legacy core systems to achieve their potential. They need “coretech.” And in 2020, they can get it.