Ever since the pandemic, and even before, insurance companies are looking for growth and agility combined with a low or at least acceptable risk in terms of delivering their promise. By launching new operations besides their legacy business, they add agility, partnering with providers of integrated products and services instead of lengthy internal building into a legacy IT landscape. This is the opportunity that adesso insurance solutions (adesso) taps into.  

adesso offers a fully comprehensive, product agnostic and cloud­capable application landscape for the international insurance market with its product in|sure Ecosphere. The product is a low-code, no-code solution that acts as a core platform.  

Simon Dufour, Head of Business Development, will be on stage at DIA Munich 2022 with Christian Buschkotte, Managing Director at andsafe to tell more about their partnership and how the adesso platform enabled andsafe to launch its digital offering in 6 months

Simon gives a sneak peek of their views and experience in this editorial, explaining how insurers speed up IT operations to launch and quickly grow new solutions and companies.  

A platform approach for maximum flexibility 

adesso is clear on the trend they see: a platform approach in which insurers renew a larger part of their IT by an integrated solution, ideally from the same tech stack. Not only for the launch of a ‘speed boat’, but also for modernizing the legacy of established, small and middle-sized players. Client expectations are evolving, and insurers are looking for new distribution channels, which both require automation and agility.  

“From sales and product management to payment, practically all elements of the value chain are impacted. This is relevant for insurance customers since this enables them to be served with new products, with low entry levels in terms of understanding them and getting a coverage as well as offerings, which constantly adapt to their needs.” 

adesso expects the insurance industry to see a growing number of new entrants, either coming from the start-up scene or from connected verticals with a fresh approach to insurance products and processes and leveraging their data-driven DNA. Traditional players, besides choosing to partner with new entrants, should consider freeing up from their legacy chains and aim at also launching new agile players to conquer this newco space. 

andsafe insurance as a good example – powered by adesso insurance solutions 

adesso enabled the launch of andsafe, a fully digital German insurance company, that sold its first policy 6 months after the IT-project started. This partnership not only resulted in a quicker start, but also in less risk in building its IT infrastructure, a steep curve in business development and the process is fully digitized which resulted in quicker client services and lower costs. Using SaaS, the company was able to focus on the differentiating parts of the value chain: product development and UX.  

As a result, customers see a fresh approach towards insurance, with simple products, no paper and they can buy a policy in less than 5 minutes. Which in the end leads to more people (consumers and small businesses) having access to coverages at fair prices.  

Challenges for the future to boost the need for automation 

While the continuous search for growth opportunities is challenging, adesso insurance solutions sees more coming with the following challenges for the future:  

1. Demography: in many Western countries, insurers have an ‘aged’ staff. With a massive shift of baby boomers towards pension age, resources require a renewal.   

2. Changing labor market: fewer newcomers will be joining the labor market, with growing demands on jobs, such as working fewer hours or having long-term appealing outlooks.  

3. Growing relevance of external data pools: be it from 3^rd party solutions that gather and exploit larger data sets than the ones from one single insurer, or coming from insurance agnostic data providers delivering data and insights that enable insurers to tap into new fields of business.  

These trends will lead to a situation where automation will not be a lever of productivity and client satisfaction yet needed to deliver basic promises. Insurers will have to move to data-driven organizations, tap into external pools and enrich their internal data in order to refine capabilities along the whole value creation chain.  

Insurance companies should honestly scrutinize their value chain proposition to determine which of its elements can be kept as they are, enhanced or even outsourced. This requires moving further away from “a not invented here” stance to a partnership culture and approach with key providers. The interoperability and scalability of IT-Systems will become key to execute on these topics. 

Who is adesso insurance solutions?  

As a wholly-owned subsidiary of the listed company adesso SE, adesso insurance solutions GmbH has been bundling its product portfolio for the international insurance market since 2014. The more than 450 insurance and IT experts at adesso insurance solutions are involved in the continuous development of the company’s products into future-proof insurance technology and solutions, and their integration into the application landscapes of its customers. 

On the in|sure Ecosphere platform, it offers insurers release-ready standard software products for all core processes of all insurance lines, including benefits/claims processing, policy management, product modeling, partner management, payment transaction processing and the calculation of commissions. The in|sure Ecosphere also features end-to-end workflow and/ or workplace control and a central user interface for processing. In|sure Ecosphere supports the automation of numerous processes, either as an entire application landscape or as individual components that can be flexibly combined with one another or the insurer’s existing applications landscape.