Legacy systems can cause major headaches for larger organisations – however, one senior insurtech figure says they’re not necessarily as difficult to overcome as many may think.
Speaking to Insurance Business, Luis Nejo – customer experience advocate and founder of Digital Experience Labs – says legacy systems carry a host of issues for insurers, brokers and end users.
“It’s been an age-old dilemma where the insurers typically have quite a large volume of legacy to deal with within an organisation and I think a lot of that is justified,” says Nejo.
“There are a few players in the space today where they’re typically very tightly bound to the insurance policies and then once they’re in there, there’s generally a heavy reluctance to want to move them along,” he continues. “You inevitably end up with large insurers that have big pockets of policy administration that they just do not want to touch.”
However, while overhauling legacy systems can seem daunting to even the most well-equipped organisations, Nejo says there are now effective means for doing so.
“Over time, a lot of things have changed – there are methods and technologies out there than can help you actually deal with that,” he says.
“There’s a lot of opportunity now to start and abstract those legacy issues from the end user – it just requires careful design and consideration and some architectural consideration.”
Nejo also pointed to a range of avenues that can help, including digital decisioning platforms and robotic process automation (RPA).
“These come in to enable businesses to start leaving these things as they are but learning how to actually cope with them and doing that in an agile fashion,” he says. “I know that’s a bit of an ironic statement to make because it’s the least agile system that exists, but all of a sudden it becomes quite versatile.”
Of course, there are still many organisations blaming legacy systems for their shortcomings but Nejo says it takes just one committed stakeholder to make a change.
“It just requires somebody within the organisation to recognise what’s actually out there,” he says. “The opportunity now exists to do a lot of prototyping that is actually quite harmless and can be done on the side – it’s also unbelievably inexpensive, it’s unbelievably low risk and it’s very accessible.”
