London insurance market turns to tech to maintain its world-leader status

A survey, by IT services provider NTT DATA, of senior leaders in the London insurance market shows a major appetite for technological change within the industry.

It finds that 70 percent of insurance leaders are looking to invest in robotic process automation (RPA) in the future, while 51 percent are focusing their budget on AI and machine learning, exploring use cases like using AI in underwriting to recognize patterns in large data sets and inform human decision making.

There is recognition of the need for change, with 60 percent of respondents saying that 'business as usual' isn't good enough. 73 percent of insurance leaders believe RPA could dramatically speed up the manual processes that still dominate back-office operations in the industry. Other motivations for driving increased uptake of these technologies are data security (69 percent), increased efficiency (62 percent) and customer-client demand (54 percent).

"After three hundred years as a world leader, the London speciality insurance market faces numerous challengers biting at its heels," says Kim Gray, head of insurance and head of diversity and inclusion at NTT DATA UK. "This research demonstrates that the drumbeat of digital innovation is forcing the incumbents to wake up and start to plan for the future. Technologies like robotic process automation offer huge opportunities for insurers to speed up previously manual processes, cutting costs and improving the customer experience. RPA, and other automation technology, sits neatly alongside existing employee skillsets, empowering them to spend more of their time on value-added analytical tasks."

The need for technology change is clearly recognised, with 64 percent of respondents saying that they have a change team in place. "It is imperative that organisations have a definitive strategy for change," adds Gray. "The technology change programme has to be integrated with the rest of the business, with the vision and budget to implement the right technology for the organisation."

The full report is available from the NTT DATA site.

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