Letter from Expert - Banking and Insurance

The banking and insurance sectors are core pillars of any economy in the world. With technology proliferation and the surgent digital transformation, these two sectors are continuously working to keep up with trends. Their business models have evolved in response to changing customer behavior and expectations. Moreover, their enormous and ever-expanding customer base comprises a significant majority of millennials and Gen-Zers, who prefer a digital, personalized, and mobile experience.

Both banks and insurance businesses traditionally have relied on stability, reliability, trust, and credibility for success. Customers were willing to wait and go through multiple checks and verification processes in return for economic stability. However, times have changed. Along with the trustworthiness and pedigree of the banks and insurance companies, agility and efficiency have become crucial. Any bank or insurance company that did not computerize early in the 90s went out of business. In the same way, the ones that fall short of going completely digital, mobile, data-driven, and providing quality customer experience will struggle to stay in business in the new decade.

For banks, providing a digital and personalized customer experience, enabling real-time transactions, and implementing real-time regulatory compliance reporting is critical. How do they achieve that? By moving fast and taking the right approach toward the digital-native technology ecosystem. The industry is already witnessing the emergence of successful products that consider the true importance of enabling maximum flexibility and scalability.

The digital-native ecosystem requires an appropriate cloud environment for analytics-based decision-making and building digital-native apps on automation-driven platforms. It facilitates them to release features to their customers faster. However, while working on agility and speed of execution, their focus should not deviate from the ecosystem’s trustworthiness and credibility. It necessitates high-grade security, which is possible with the ever-evolving cloud-native security services. The emergence of a host of new-age SaaS systems for network security, web application security, and Zero Trust Network will provide the necessary foundation and control on which operations can be expanded and modernized.

On the other hand, insurance companies will need to reinvent themselves by creating customizable products and services to gain customers. These could be offers for specific demographics or differentiating the brand with cutting-edge innovation. In addition, insurance firms must develop or adopt highly-effective online platforms to seamlessly integrate with major channel partners and provide greater agility and speed of conducting business anytime, anywhere.

Developing successful products that offer customization flexibility against bespoke customer needs will require a highly scalable digital cloud platform. Leveraging the cloud-native ML and AI services for analyzing large volumes of personal and preferential data on social media and across the internet will help insurers to have the right profiling of potential customers and build the intelligence needed for creating the brand uniqueness needed for success.

I must say that the banking and insurance industry must revitalize existing operations and continuously focus on improving customer experience. Digital transformation powered by the cloud is the most feasible solution, in combination with facilitating the demand-supply balance, enabling smart transactions, and providing 24/7 operations. In the upcoming years, banks and insurance companies will need to adopt next-generation technologies and shift away from legacy systems.

Widescale digital transformation and cloud adoption are pushing banking and insurance companies to prepare for the future by evolving how they do business. Eliminating the burden of traditional systems as early as possible is inevitable for the industry to build resiliency and be better equipped to proactively mitigate challenges for staying ahead of the competition.