A webinar hosted by the Centre for Study of Insurance Operations (CSIO) for its members tackled how insurers have handled their digital transformations over the COVID-19 pandemic – and an industry expert was present to share her insights and her company’s experiences.
The webinar, entitled “The Digital Transformation Agenda: Building the Foundation for Future Success,” was held on February 23. The event’s speaker was Tatjana Lalkovic, senior vice president and chief information officer of technology solutions with Economical Insurance. She was joined by CSIO president and CEO Catherine Smola, who also served as the moderator of the webinar.
According to Lalkovic, customers have now come to expect the same integrated digital experience from their insurer, as they have from today’s tech companies.
“They want to be engaged in the way they want, and it’s key for us to meet them there,” the executive said during the webinar.
Lalkovic went into detail about various topics related to the digital agenda for Economical, including how the company defined its digital platform strategy to provide value to both brokers and customers, how it managed to align its teams to deliver solutions with speed, its capability to attract talent, and how Economical enabled 98% of its workforce to safely work remotely from home during the first two weeks of the pandemic lockdowns.
The executive also said during the forum that Economical is constantly evolving its business to compete effectively.
“We have a diversely experienced leadership team which, together, is focused on continuous purposeful innovation - and thinking outside the box. I am a big supporter of agile delivery practices with close business collaboration and measurable incremental value,” she stated.
Lalkovic also shared during the webinar that Economical had recently adopted CSIO’s My Proof of Insurance solution.
“It’s one of the great examples of how we enable our brokers to deliver digital capabilities to their customers,” she said. “As an industry we need to focus on leveraging common solutions to improve the broker and customer experience, and to get us there faster.”
The future of insurance technology was also discussed in the webinar, with Lalkovic projecting that 10 or so years from now, the industry will still focus on things such as cloud, data, cybersecurity and insurtech.
“Leveraging data is critical for success,” she said. Businesses must consider augmenting their existing infrastructure with re-usable frameworks and automation to enable agility. These models will allow you to continuously explore the data in different ways, create technology flexibly to enable the exploration, trust the data, and have it secured - all critical for innovating with speed and purpose.”
CSIO’s live webinars are part of its eLearning course offerings, and are free for all members of the association. The webinar featuring Lalkovic is available as an on-demand course as part of CSIO’s “Spotlight Series” of one-hour video courses led by senior industry leaders, and can be accessed through the association’s website.
