How to survive the ‘World Digitalization War’
Since many years I’m ‘fighting’ for a platform approach within the financial sector having learned from Apple, Amazon and other successful non-financial platform companies.
Now this idea is taking off slowly and entering the insurance idea space.
But a Platform Economy is more than ‘Added Value Services’. These (new) services are indeed important parts of a (new) strategy, but only just a fraction of the necessary changes . You still have some action items.
I believe you need to enter two main paths down the road in order to become a true Platform Company:
- You need to develop your Insurance Company to a Developer Company with software and hardware development skills as core skills, everywhere and all over your company. Not only in IT, but also in business and supporting units. Like in a Startup – 80% of your employees should have an IT background.
- You need to deploy an Open Ecosystem Platform Architecture, one empowering you with the help of software and hardware to becoming an Ecosystem Insurance Company. One open and distributed architecture, where all parties can easily connect with and develop trust in. A blockchain based core might be the choice.
And adding just new services very likely provided by third parties and delivered through third party hardware and channels is not enough and too short-sighted. Services are the results of step one and two, but not a strategy’s foundation, a transition step, but not a long-term strategy.
If you don’t connect directly to the customer with the help of your proprietary soft- and hardware you will lose the customer in the end or/and your partner takes over.
Connect your partners with your systems, don’t let you being connected to something. If you don’t want to compete only on price then consider the next decade as a survival fight for new insurers in a new digitized world.
Only when you once have deployed your own ‘Alexa’ powered by your own software and connected and controlled by your open and distributed insurance architecture you can label your insurance company an 4.0 Enabled insurer.
Then you will leave these new ‘Killing Fields of Digitalization’ as winner.