Seven Factors that Determine Best-in-Class Tech for UK Group Risk
Our previous blog post looked at the ongoing challenge facing UK group risk: many group risk insurers are managing their expanding businesses via outdated legacy systems, fragmented technology stacks, and even old-school Excel spreadsheets.
UK group risk insurers need new tech, but what should they be looking for? A truly modern group risk ecosystem is defined by these seven factors:
- End-to-end integration: from initial quote – through underwriting, policy administration, claims management, and reporting – every process flows through a single integrated platform. This eliminates data silos, reduces manual data entry, and ensures a single source of truth for all policy information.
- Intelligent automation: routine tasks – like benefit calculations, premium adjustments for salary changes, and renewal processing – become automated. This frees underwriters and administrators to focus on complex cases and relationship management, rather than repetitive, manual tasks.
- Flexible product configuration: markets evolve quickly. Insurers need to rapidly configure new products, adjust benefit structures, and respond to changing employer demands without lengthy IT development cycles. Modern platforms enable business users to make product changes, without requiring developer intervention.
- Intelligent data processing: modern platforms should handle structured and unstructured data seamlessly. Whether member information arrives in an Excel spreadsheet or a Word document, the system should intelligently extract, validate, and load the data, without manual intervention. This capability is essential for efficient onboarding of new schemes and processing of member changes.
- Consolidated rating and pricing: all rating factors, historical claims experience, and pricing models should be centralised and instantly accessible. When an underwriter opens a renewal case, every piece of relevant information should be at their fingertips. One integrated view enables faster, more accurate pricing decisions.
- Real-time analytics and reporting: management needs visibility into portfolio performance, claims experience, and emerging trends in real time, not weeks after the end of the month, when spreadsheets have been reconciled. Employee benefit consultants and employers expect sophisticated reporting and should receive it through self-service portals.
- Scalable cloud architecture: cloud-based platforms eliminate the costs and constraints of on-premises infrastructure. They provide flexibility to scale operations up or down based on demand, deploy updates without system downtime, and ensure business continuity through robust disaster recovery.
Transform or Fall Behind
The UK group risk market is growing and the opportunity for insurers with a modern technology foundation is significant. Cost savings, efficiency gains, and growth acceleration are all within reach, but only with the right technology partner to facilitate the transformation.
Insurers who upgrade their technology infrastructure can achieve significant cost savings through automation and efficiency gains, accelerate growth by responding faster to market opportunities, and leverage data insights to price more accurately, develop better products, and comply with regulations.
By working with the right transformation partner, group risk insurers can acquire the modern technology foundation that consultants and employers expect.
For Part 1 of this blog series, “UK Group Risk Is Growing…Will Its Tech Keep Up?” click here.
Sapiens Can Help!
To see how Sapiens’ AI-powered, integrated business solutions empower group risk insurers to accelerate innovation and deliver competitive advantage, click here.
