“I think they’re still very, very slow to move.”
That was the assertion made by Blue Zebra Insurance (BZI) chief technology officer Amar Roomi (pictured) – referring to industry incumbents and whether or not they have been embracing technology – when Insurance Business caught up with the CTO, whose experience includes years spent with a major insurance group headquartered in Australia.
In Roomi’s view, traditional insurers are still playing catch-up on the tech front.
“The part of organisations that has moved the quickest is their digital front-end footprint, which is the point of the sword when it comes to their interactions with direct customers,” he noted, citing the increased digital presence of insurers over the past decade.
“What hasn’t really moved at all – even with the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on this already and sometimes unsuccessfully – is their back-end systems. A lot of these back-end systems are 30 to 40 years old, and I would say probably 80% of all policies in Australia sold today will still be going through mainframe legacy systems that are 40 years old.”
So, what will it take to improve both the front and back ends of an insurance firm? For Roomi, it’s crucial to have technology and business teams working closely together, armed with sufficient understanding of each other’s respective expertise.
The CTO explained: “What often happens in big insurance companies is you have a technology team that is qualified when it comes to the technology skillset but doesn’t know much about insurance. Then you have the other side, which understands the business needs and problems and insurance really well but doesn’t have any technological background.
“So, there’s a real gap between idea and execution. And I think if these big insurers really want to move the needle, they have to upskill their insurance people enough to be able to execute on their transformation programmes. You have got to invest in people.”
Another important element, according to Roomi, is a “clear signal” from the organisation’s C-suite to make the change happen.
“I think the biggest lesson that you take away from the insurance industry in general, is there are a lot of very passionate insurance people with great ideas but very limited capacity to execute on those ideas, whether that’s because of a lack of technical skillsets or – and this is often the case – decision-making,” he stated.
“Decision-making in major corporations is extremely painful, and often a large number of decisions don’t get made effectively. If you’re not making decisions, you’re not doing anything; you’re not developing; you’re not growing.”
The keen ones, meanwhile, are helping transform insurance and the industry.
Roomi told Insurance Business: “What has happened over the last 10 years, between the cloud and the adoption of new programming languages, is that it has effectively given people the ability to enter into a new world – ‘I’ve got this idea, I’ve got this product, I’ve got all this drive, and now I want to execute on it’, and all of a sudden the barrier to entry to actually do something has been lowered.”
