At a recent LIMRA Annual Conference a stand-out session, led by Tim Calvert of Boston Consulting Group and Alison Salka of LIMRA titled: “What’s on the Minds of Executives Across the Globe”, unveiled the findings from their latest study in which they asked more than 500 life insurance C-suite and executive-level leaders from around the world, “What’s keeping you up at night?”
The three biggest challenges faced by life insurance leaders
The LIMRA study highlighted the challenges for executives in North America along with the other global regions. Interestingly, change management emerged as the greatest challenge faced by C-suite life insurance executives across all regions.
While the top three executive challenges in North America included:
- Growth
- Technology
- Change management
The three greatest global challenges included:
- Change management
- Customer experience
- Growth
These challenges are all interconnected. A top priority for all insurance companies, growth, requires insurers to modernize their technology. Aging legacy systems typically impede innovation and prevent adoption of newer solutions.
A lack of the right talent and skills necessary to turn new technology into tangible capability leveraged by the business is also part of the challenge.
Interconnected challenges in life insurance
Challenges like change management, technology, customer experience and growth are constant themes that we think about at Equisoft. It seems clear that an organization’s modernization journey is about its people, processes and technology—you can’t just focus on one and hope to experience the benefits of a digital transformation.
For example, in our Timely Advice Before Starting Your Policy Administration Modernization eBook our own Chief Product Officer, Olivier Lafontaine, shared Equisoft’s experiences with insurers working through the process of selecting the right vendor.
An essential element of getting the journey off on the right foot and ensuring its ultimate success was to involve key stakeholders from the beginning and to get executive-level support.
Choosing the right technology is important—but getting the change management piece correct is vital.
In our recent eBook—What Every CIO and Business Leader Should Know About Enhancing Customer Experience Through Legacy System Modernization in Life Insurance—we examined why customer expectations have increased to the point that they are now the top priority for many insurers and demonstrated that creating the superior digital experiences customers demand will only be possible with modern policy admin systems and integrated digital front-end tools.
The keys to successful transformation
As discussed in this LIMRA session, top life insurance executives recognize the need of their organization to keep the pace with evolving customer expectations, technology and economic conditions.
They need a corporate culture to embrace change, people who can implement new technologies and new ways to engage underserved customers.
At Equisoft, our vision is to provide all insurance stakeholders with the solutions and expertise they need to achieve everyone’s number one mission—helping their clients achieve their goals.
