{"id":1005,"date":"2015-08-25T12:51:00","date_gmt":"2015-08-25T12:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/projects\/horsesforsources\/insurance-aas-blueprint_082515\/"},"modified":"2015-08-25T12:51:00","modified_gmt":"2015-08-25T12:51:00","slug":"insurance-aas-blueprint_082515","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/insurance-aas-blueprint_082515\/","title":{"rendered":"TCS, EXL, Concentrix and Infosys set the As-a-Service pace for Insurance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Insurance is priming the pump for industry-centric As-a-Service<\/a> solutions. \u00a0The insurance space is one of those industries where it’s all in the sales, marketing and customer experience, so the more the delivery engine can he standardized and run efficiently, the more cost savings can be passed onto the customer and intelligent data to the service provider to set their policies, pricing and future strategies.<\/p>\n

Insurance majors were among the first Western enterprises to open offshore captive centers in India and Philippines to process and adjudicate clients, support customer service etc. \u00a0However, the main issue that has long-plagued the carriers has been finding value beyond<\/em> the initial offshore cost-savings. \u00a0I personally recall hosting a roundtable of eleven major insurance BPO clients five years’ ago, and the common consensus was “The only way to find incremental value is by tech-enabling our processes”.<\/p>\n

So has this industry been making genuine progress as we evolve to the As-a-Service model<\/a>? \u00a0So who better to ask than the one analyst who has been tracking this space intensely ever since she joined HfS four years ago,\u00a0Reetika Joshi<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"HfS-Blueprint<\/a><\/p>\n

Click to Enlarge<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

What is \u201cInsurance As-a-Service\u201d and how is it different from insurance BPO?<\/span><\/p>\n

Phil, insurance is a mature market for BPO \u2013 core insurance processes like claims processing have been outsourced for over a decade now. Our discussions with property & casualty (P&C) and life & annuities (L&A) carriers across client markets indicate that these services buyers seek value beyond the transactional back-office work of the past. Their expectations include more delivery of standardized processes on modern business platforms, an expanded scope of services and the incorporation of robotic process automation and operational analytics in core operations. We see increased investment and interest from services buyers along with service providers to modernize core processes across the outsourced\/offshored\/in-house\/partner ecosystem to include these elements. For further reading, we published a report on this topic in May 2015 based on a buyer survey – Moving Insurance BPO into the As-a-Service Economy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What are some of the changes you\u2019ve seen in the market since the last Blueprint?<\/span><\/p>\n

Industry forces are definitively impacting the nature of sourcing in insurance \u2013 be it more regulatory scrutiny and compliance requirements, aggressive competition, low margins or intensified market consolidation. To pull out a couple of examples:<\/p>\n