Harnessing the Power of Platform – Thinking to Shape the Future of the Insurance Industry

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, Insurers are embracing platform thinking as a strategic approach to accelerate digital transformation across business and technical functions. Ascent has published a whitepaper called “The Platform-Thinking Insurer,” in which Robert Rimmele, Principal Architect and Insurance specialist, and Mohammed Brueckner, Senior Enterprise Architect at Ascent, explore how platforms are crucial for innovation, breaking down value chains, efficiently addressing legacy systems, and improving customer experience in the insurance industry.

Defined as both a business model and a technical architecture, platforms offer insurers a robust framework for standardising interactions between users and systems at scale, therefore promoting efficiency, growth, and mutual advantage. By adopting a platform-first approach, insurers can swiftly create and scale market advantage and efficiently build new capabilities.

Central to the whitepaper is the notion of value chain modularization: a strategic approach to enhance efficiency, manage complexity, and improve flexibility in supply chains. Breaking down the value chain into modular components offers several key advantages:

• Agility and Flexibility: Insurers can swiftly adapt to market changes, customer demands, and regulatory requirements by breaking down the value chain into modular components.
• Cost Efficiency: Modularization enables insurers to optimize costs by focusing on specific components, choosing to build, buy, or partner for each module.
• Innovation and Collaboration: Collaboration with external partners becomes more accessible, allowing insurers to tap into external expertise and technologies to enhance their offerings.
• Customer-Centric Approach: Modularization enables insurers to tailor services to individual customer needs, enhancing customer satisfaction.
• Scalability: Insurers can scale their operations or enter new markets seamlessly, adding or removing modules as needed without overhauling the entire system.

The whitepaper also outlines practical applications of platform thinking to value chain modularization, emphasising the importance of platform engineering teams in designing and managing a well-defined stack of platforms.

Whilst adopting a platform-thinking approach may be a challenging journey, the whitepaper serves as a comprehensive guide for insurers looking to leverage platform thinking as a strategy to accelerate and reduce the risks inherent in ongoing innovation. Drawbacks such as legacy mindsets, resistance to change, and inadequate scalability considerations are addressed, providing insurers with actionable insights to navigate the complexities of digital transformation.

To learn more about Ascent’s impact on platform thinking in insurance and access the full whitepaper, visit https://www.ascent.io/sector/insurance