A panel of insurance technology experts agreed yesterday that to achieve maximum benefit from standardisation, multinational insurers would require tighter working relationships between IT managers and business leaders.
The panel discussion at the annual Insurance Technology Congress, sponsored and hosted by Xchanging, entitled ‘Can Systems Really Differentiate Your Business?’ assessed the challenges national and multinational insurers face and how IT can ease those.
The panel agreed that systems are an important component in differentiating organisations and that further investment in legacy systems would be necessary to bridge the gap to more permanent solutions. The debate then turned to the issue of standardisation in the context of driving consistency within organisations spread across different territories.
Jim Sadler, Chief Information Officer for Xchanging UK insurance sector, said: “The trick is configurability within IT systems, to allow the back-office to operate consistently, while allowing the front end to be tailored to each location.”
In doing so and with close IT and senior team collaboration, the panel felt insurers would gain the most from both standardisation and customisation. “In this way, global standards are achievable through back-office consistency while allowing the front end and customer facing aspects to be more bespoke”, Jim added.
The panel also viewed standardisation, as a means of achieving consistency across multiple territories, was in itself a differentiator. For such large-scale projects to work, the panel were unanimous that strong partnerships between IT managers and business managers were essential.
At the end of the session, 78% of delegates voted ‘yes’ to the question: can systems differentiate your business?
|
