Using Technology to Revolutionize Insurance Product Development and Meet Customer Expectations

The consumption patterns of the current generation have caused a major shift in handling insurance needs. The most significant change is that new product development and personalized sales experiences have become important drivers for insurers’ financial strength and business growth.  

The pandemic has also shaped consumer behavior, with customers expecting a seamless experience across different apps and online platforms to help with their daily needs. They're expecting the same sophisticated and seamless experience in other areas, including insurance coverage.

Insurers need the ability to launch new products quickly and offer policy features that are fit for the market to gain or sustain their market share. Unfortunately, product changes often require layers of approval even before getting added to the IT project queue for months-long implementation, which comes at a substantial cost in time and money.  

Traditionally, it can take months or a year of scoping, analysis, documentation, development, and testing to refactor the original insurance product models from Excel to the code required to calculate the price of a single product.  An equally lengthy undertaking is required to design, develop, verify, and deploy an engaging user experience to support the product sales.  

Case study – How Coherent Spark Helped One Customer Accelerate Their Product Launch

One of our life insurance clients realized a need for greater ease of use and the ability to run multiple scenarios in real-time with their customers. Life insurance is a highly regulated industry where educating, quoting, and onboarding customers can be a lengthy process.  They needed to enable financial advisors to illustrate the value of their products in a clear and captivating way tailored to each individual. Our customer wished to launch a scenario-driven sales tool for their distribution channels, which would be a key component in their sales technology ecosystem.  

When the client reached out to us, they only had 3.5 months until their target launch date, but the product was still under development. In addition, the product actuaries needed vigorous testing to assure the product met the desired profit margin and to design the appropriate scenarios in the sales tool. All of that was done in Excel, which is the typical “go-to” choice for actuaries. The sales tool design and development, instructions manual, and distribution materials were all on the line and subject to product sign-off.  

By leveraging Coherent Spark, the sales tool production time was shortened to roughly two months, while the fine-tuning of product design occurred in parallel.  

This result was possible because:

• The product business logic was able to turn into a REST API instantly through Spark. Spark removes the development cycle of re-coding the original Excel into some programming language and having to QA that code again.  
• At the time, a lot of testing was done by the product actuaries, so version control and governance of the logic were necessary. Without Spark, the re-coding of Excel would have had to be done multiple times due to features and profitability testing.  
  Spark allows centralized control, auditability & full logging of product actuaries’ model and API execution. It made assumption testing or combinations of business logic much easier for the actuaries in terms of restoring, rerunning, and the comparison of previous API versions capabilities.
• The Spark-generated API was connected to the sales tool, allowing developers to develop and test the functional requirements, independent of the product development. This allowed two workstreams to work simultaneously.  

‍Let Spark ignite your competitiveness

Spark enables actuaries to focus on what they do best: creating complex models while also allowing that logic to be connected to other systems without requiring specialized coding skills. Spark removes the need for development hours to document, understand, recreate, and test a recreation of that native logic in another programing language.  

Spark also saves hundreds of hours of developing, recoding, and testing time.  The API endpoint generated by Spark can power front-end and back-end logic, connecting to modern and legacy platforms, digital tools, and distribution portals. This means models on Spark are reusable across teams and geography and it’s a safe way to expose logic, hence reducing key-man risk.  

The insurance industry is undergoing a significant transformation as it strives to keep up with evolving customer expectations and market demands. Coherent Spark enables insurers to adapt to these changes more efficiently by streamlining the development and deployment of complex insurance products and applications. By empowering actuaries and business users with a faster, more agile development process, insurers can deliver personalized and innovative solutions to their customers, ultimately driving business growth and maintaining a competitive edge in the market.

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