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Digitization in life insurance

How to make the leap into the future

Leverage digital business potential – with Munich Re

Digitization and Big Data in life insurance

A presentation by Munich Re expert Frank Schiller

Digitization has been a standard feature in life and health insurance for quite some time now. This is reflected in the number of apps and wearables available, in online offers and various automated solutions. At first glance, many of these appear extremely sophisticated. But behind the scenes, numerous processes are still carried out manually, and in many instances are even paper-based. So insurance operations are still a long way from achieving a significant increase in efficiency with seamless digital processing.

The road to the digital future remains a long one beset with challenges. These include complex legacy system landscapes with unlinked datasets in sales, the management of insurance applications and claims processing, major anti-selection risks from overly generalised automated solutions, and serious regulatory obstacles.

There is no alternative to digitization
Insurers must act if they wish to remain competitive. Fast, transparent, digital business processes are needed that have a strong customer focus. On the company side, digitization also offers enormous potential for improvements, in the form of more efficient processes, falling costs, new findings and product innovation driven by data analytics.

Munich Re can assist at every stage of the value chain
In other words: If you digitize too late or in the wrong way, you will lose market share. New opportunities and business potential beckon for those who respond promptly. It is vital to take advantage of the opportunities. And we are the right partner for you. We possess the business expertise, the knowledge of risk and the experts you need. We have scalable automation and digitization solutions, sets of regulations, analysis tools, the latest technologies, and the appropriate compliance and security landscape. We can use this digitization power to assist you at every stage of the value chain.

Level of digitization in life insurance in comparison with other industries

Our strengths as a digitization partner

Shared objectives

Sharing risk is the mainstay of our business model as a reinsurer. The digital transformation will not alter this position. On the contrary, we want to exploit with you the opportunities to extend insurability and expand our joint business activities.

To this end, we develop innovative digital tools and products that strengthen your competitive position and in which we participate in the usual way as Munich Re. We provide expertise and capital – for example by assuming individually agreed portions of the risk.

The long-term success of our joint digitization projects is therefore in both our intrinsic interests. That and our expert knowledge of your market are what set us apart.

Intelligent sets of rules and algorithms

Digitization and automation in life and health insurance are not just questions of technology. An in-depth understanding of the risks and the connections between them is required to be able to work with the digital data that is available now and in the future in a way that creates value. This is particularly true with regard to risk assessment and claims processing.

As Munich Re, this is precisely the understanding we can offer. This, coupled with our global expertise in medical insurance matters, our actuarial services and risk management, has enabled us to develop sets of rules and algorithms that have proved highly effective in practice. In online use, in tele-underwriting and in various industry solutions at the point of sale.

Scalable and customisable solutions

The true potential from digitization only becomes apparent if it is consistently implemented along the value chain. But there are still significant gaps at many providers, above all in life insurance, and specifically in the areas of risk assessment and claims processing.

In order to close these digitization gaps effectively and economically, we have now developed a full range of complete solutions in the MIRA Digital Suite. These can be easily scaled without the providers’ risk profiles losing their sharpness. This is because the MIRA Digital Suite solutions can be used on a modular basis as software as a service, and can be thoroughly customised as required.

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Informative data analytics

Consistent digitization not only accelerates processes, but also delivers the raw material for completely new findings: data, data and more data. We provide a standardised format for this knowledge pool. For the first time, we allow a previously unimaginable volume of information from a very wide range of sources to be combined.

The principal requirement in the next step is, firstly, the application of the necessary expertise and, secondly, the use of powerful analysis tools to extract the relevant findings from the new abundance of data. These findings will help meet the challenges in life and health insurance. As Munich Re, we possess both the know-how and the tools, and can contribute all of our data analytics power to your projects.

You can find out more about our data analytics service here