Microservices - Part 2

Digitization is leading to a change in the insurance industry. According to Michael Loeters, one of the chairmen of the Insurance Broker Association of Canada (IBAC), the current systems insurers now operate will soon be a thing of the past. Insurance companies are investing hundreds of millions of euros in innovative technologies which will deliver entirely new applications. The focus is now on transmitting data in real time via microservices or similar technologies. This will enable agile and effortless communication between brokers, insurers and other partners. For example, a broker will be able to request a premium calculation from an insurer via a microservice and receive the data instantly. As a result, traditional insurance portals will no longer be necessary because the broker will be able to work directly from his own broker software, and will welcome the greater convenience and increased transparency.

The Diffusion of New Technologies Will Take Time

Previous systems operated by insurers have been only bridge solutions in the attempt to achieve real-time data exchange. Now the technical means is at last available to deploy microservices across the industry. However, despite the obvious advantages, only a few insurers and brokers have so far deployed microservices.

This situation is much like the use of GPS data at the beginning of the 2000s. Even though navigation systems were available, they often failed to guide users to the correct destination or chose unnecessarily complicated routes. Just a few years later, optimized systems became accessible to the mass market. Similar developments are now underway for insurance companies. Initial teething problems can be overcome and lessons learned, because in the longer term this will open up some totally new opportunities for the entire industry.

Part one of this series: Microservices – an innnovative platform for Insurers.

This article was first published on LinkedIn.