A global IT firm has revealed plans to launch an international insurance operating system in the Australian market thanks to a partnership with an Australian project managing firm.
Capgemini Australia and Adaptra have joined forces to try to redefine the way insurers and brokers address key industry challenges using their Insurance Connect platform.
Insurance Connect, which was launched in North America last year, is a platform-as-a-service solution for policy administration, billing services, claims management and business intelligence, and Capgemini’s senior vice-president, Manoj Khera, believes the innovation could change the Australian insurance industry.
“There are a couple of things that will really enable a brokerage firm or other client. The launch of service or time to market for launching a service or product would reduce drastically as we would have accelerators that will be deployed and the capital investment or expenditure will go away as it will be a platform-as-a-service model.
“At the operational level, it will offer more functionality. We will use GuideWire as a platform and AWS as a hosting partner which will give the best of both worlds to clients.”
Capgemini has released a World Insurance Report for the last seven years which looks at trends in the insurance industry globally and found that customer experience in Australia has fallen 4.6 points over the last 12 months.
“I am very confident that in 18 months’ time when our clients have gone live, it will demonstrate an improvement on the customer experience index for brokerage firms and retail insurance,” said Khera of the imminent launch.
Khera revealed that Insurance Connect already has a major client lined-up and they have taken the end-to-end offering from Capgemini but admitted that the biggest challenge facing the launch is Australia’s slow rate of technological adoption.
“The challenge would be how quickly the Australian market can adopt these offers.
“As we’ve seen in the past, these are the tools, technologies, techniques, accelerators which Australia has struggled to adopt fast, and that is where we come in with our global expertise and experience.
“We try to educate and share with our clients, industry veterans and analysts to give them an insight and view to how Australia can improve.
“We need to be sure that we continue innovating.”
