COLLABORATION
D E T R A H C N Y U R O T I R R E T Mike Eksteen is Chief of Growth and Product at an insurtech that allows every actor in the value chain, whatever their stage of digital transformation, to collaborate across one platform. It’s ‘not rocket science’, but it does allow the industry to seek out brave new worlds It’s fair to say that consumers don’t view insurance firms as technological pioneers; they don’t expect them to be as intuitively helpful as Google or infinitely satisfying as Amazon. In fact, we tend to have a grudging relationship with cover holders, which is transactional at best. And, because of this historic interaction model, insurers have not needed to be at the cutting-edge of IT. At a time when many other businesses have migrated from legacy systems to mobile and Cloud solutions, for example, insurers remain some of the largest users of mainframe technology. Times, however, are changing – and changing fast. The insurance industry is rapidly evolving away from being heavily reliant upon ageing technology stacks, inefficient workflows, fragmented distribution and limited access to quality data. www.fintechf.com
For Mike Eksteen, chief of growth and product at Uncharted, the Singapore-based insurance-as-a-service platform, the goal is digitisation and simplification of the insurance product process. But first, he says, insurance needs to accept that the industry is one that consumers prefer not to have to think about or deal with. “It’s a tough thing to swallow, but people don’t want to interact with insurance companies. They just don’t, and I think the faster insurance companies understand that, the better for the end customer. Rather, the way that they would like to consume insurance is through their existing lifetime or lifecycle journeys,” he says. As part of his job to drive a worldwide growth strategy for Uncharted, Eksteen has established a ‘product-led layer within the company’. The product in question is the Uncharted Cloud, a bunch of services that enable product development, underwriting and digital distribution across insurance transaction flows. “From an insurance standpoint, building out the technology, the open API framework, to then make that product available and integrated into a frontend environment, like a bank, or a distribution endpoint, or a partner,
just makes absolute sense,” he says. “It allows accessibility for the customer; you’re not asking them to drop whatever they’re doing and go to a separate insurance experience, which, no matter how good the user experience is, none of us really enjoys. “So, these partnerships are absolutely crucial, not only to grow an ecosystem environment, but also to push insurance into the future – that combination with a bank or other distribution endpoint, which could be a Google or Amazon because they understand how to manage clients, they understand customer service, they have all the technology deployed to do that and they do all the work to acquire the customer. A secure data framework set up within that, then allows the insurer to access that customer and provide the product within a journey that is frictionless.” There are several ways in which underwriters, who develop and risk assess a product, the carriers, who customise and price it, and product distributors can use the Uncharted Cloud, whether they’re searching for an end-to-end solution or just looking to supplement part of an existing system or process. “It enables the carriers, on one side, to make their products available through digital distribution, and also to test and sandbox products,” says Eksteen. “It enables them to, in some cases, innovate outside of the internal security frameworks around the product, with price testing and so forth.” Issue 5 | TheInsurtechMagazine
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