Member Spotlight: Earnix
Aaron, what does your role at Earnix involve?
I am the Director of Strategy at Earnix. Using my insurance background, I set company strategy and work with global insurance companies to modernise their approach to insurance and technology. This enables insurers to offer innovative and personalised products to their customers.
What challenges are insurers facing with legacy technology?
Our recent ‘Modernizing Insurance Operations’ survey highlighted that legacy technology hinders insurers’ abilities to meet customers’ expectations and quickly create product offers. Nearly 30% of respondents said that the most challenging aspect of legacy systems was the overall lack of flexibility and difficulty to personalise offers. Another quarter of respondents cited a talent shortfall, as experienced employees are needed to maintain and use legacy systems through expertise in retired programming languages. Other concerns were slow time to market (18%) and too many manual updates (16%).
What are insurers’ current priorities when it comes to modernising their infrastructure and processes?
While all insurance processes have important automation and efficiency needs, our survey identified the greatest needs as dynamic pricing, fraud analytics and personalised add-on offers. According to the findings, investment will increase most in product personalisation and telematics-based products. Insurers realise many internal processes could benefit from modernisation but rating, pricing and product personalisation were ranked highest.
What are the challenges in changing insurance rates?
Traditional rating and pricing systems tend to be individual siloed applications that require a lot of time, manual effort and are often prone to errors. For example, our survey showed the median time to implement a significant rate change was four months. Additionally, no survey respondents reported that they could update ratings in less than one month, with some needing a full year or longer. This can lead to significant pricing delays and missed opportunities.
How can Earnix help insurers with rating, pricing and product personalisation?
Earnix’s solutions enable insurance companies to define, personalise and deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered offers and bundles into the marketplace. This helps them to provide tailored offers to customers, streamlining their buying journey. This can lead to an increase in cross-selling, up-selling and overall sales. Additionally, Earnix monitors real-time market performance and adapts product and pricing strategies to align with changing customer demands.
What areas of pricing analytics are most in need of improvement?
Pricing analytics, at its core, is a data-driven prediction of the future. Simulating future pricing changes to anticipate their outcomes gives an accurate basis for determining where additional adjustments are needed. Simulation was revealed as the number one area in pricing analytics, in the Earnix survey, that needs improvement. The survey had almost 90% of respondents ranking it as the highest need in their recurrent processes for automation and efficiency gain.
What insurance trends does Earnix expect to see over the next 12 months?
We’ve seen that inflation – led by supply chain disruptions, high interest rates, energy shortages, rising wages and geopolitical events – continues to be a concern for insurers. Insurers combat these trends by increasing their efficiency, reducing costs and focusing on winning and retaining customers.
Earnix anticipates an increase in the use of intelligent automation, telematics, AI and machine learning to process large volumes of data. Insurers will also continue to invest in product personalisation to enhance the customer journey.
We also expect an increased focus on ESG driven by regulators, investors and customers. Companies are monitoring the effects of climate change on insurance, as changing conditions could disrupt the entire industry and threaten company solvency.
What are Earnix’s plans for 2023?
In 2023, Earnix will continue to enhance its product capabilities with a focus on dynamic monitoring, machine learning innovations and underwriting analytics. Advancing partnerships with industry tech giants will be another cornerstone of Earnix’s efforts to grow its global footprint.
What should readers do if they want to learn more?
They can visit our website at earnix.com and attend our Summit Excelerate 2023 “Growing through Change” for two days of insurance insights, perspectives, case studies, approaches and more.