On June 8th one of the most storied digital-first insurers, Lemonade, announced its IPO with an estimated $2B valuation. Although a niche insurer, Lemonade is unique in that it has little if any IT legacy baggage to slow its speed to market or diminish the customer experience, and it is using predictive analytics and personalization to handle insurance processes.
Disruptors, like Lemonade, are here to stay. Every day we see more challenges to the traditional insurance value chain from startups, insuretechs, and new service providers with great ideas and innovative approaches. As a longstanding insurance company, how are you handling this? Are you embracing it? Is your company easy to partner with? Are you getting in position? If not, it’s time to make some lemonade of your own!
Getting in position in its simplest form means readiness to partner. You make data available easily and in a secure and protected way. You pledge to handle others’ data in a similar fashion. You can connect your processes with my processes and make it look seamless to the customer. You can effectively monitor the business from end to end. You can meter and measure your service level commitments against reality. These are your lemons. You should be squeezing them, hard.
Being in a good partnering position requires vision, leadership, transparency and the right mindset that breaks from status quo. Countless times I get the “You don’t understand us. We are so unique. Your solution just won’t work in our environment.” Protecting status quo dooms partnering.
In some organizations, calling in an outsider is viewed as failure. Shifting the culture, changing expectations, and getting the right people “on the bus” is critical. Over the years, we’ve seen bad habits repeat. We’ve witnessed countless mistakes when a new IT partner is brought onboard. The rush to ramp up and start becomes a priority. Setting expectations and aligning people gets shortchanged, assumed, or ignored entirely. Your culture and talent are your internal wellspring. Only you can make sure the water is transparent from top to bottom.
Let’s add some sugar to make that lemonade. This is the sweet enabling technologies and architectures that blend with the lemons and the water. Digitalization, cloud, automation/orchestration, RPA, API’s, AI/big data, cybersecurity, platforms and others all become critical ingredients. This sugar is expensive, but can rapidly pay for itself in lowering technical debt and supporting business objectives. You also get a two-for-one deal. Often by partnering with an innovator you will get the enabling technology and the benefits of the disruption. This only works when you truly are in a position to partner, and your new partner agrees!
Tek.Advisors makes partnerships work. We have insurance industry experience and a unique network of partners with innovative services and solutions for the global insurance market. We have the capabilities to help you with your lemons, clean up the water, and bring the sugar of the enabling technologies. Let’s mix up a batch of some great lemonade!