Low-code development approach has been burgeoning at an extraordinarily disruptive pace, especially since the pandemic, with wider and rapid adoption by even top global players in various industries. Poised to disrupt traditional application development, enterprises today have realized their growing importance in accelerating their successful digital transformation. And the insurance industry is no different, having begun to embrace low-code/no-code platforms to aid their digitalization journey.
Like every other industry, insurance businesses have accepted that digital transformation is the key to staying relevant in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape and beating competition, mostly since customers have soaring expectations and want unparalleled customer experience at all touch points. And insurers are perplexed on how to deliver these capabilities without introducing complexity or disrupting their existing IT systems since that would lead to them having to modernize their core systems which in turn can burn a hole in their budget.
This points out that one of the key challenges for insurance carriers for a while that is hindering their digital transformation efforts is the age-old legacy insurance applications and systems. Built mostly on COBOL, Delphi, and the like, the monolithic insurance legacy systems impede the efficiency of insurance businesses in various ways.
- Highly rigid and do not allow easy integration of new-age offerings and applications with the core insurance mainframe systems
- Unable to provide great customer experience
- High maintenance costs
- Niche IT talent shortage (Legacy system talent)
- Unable to integrate new-age applications easily
- Impacts business resilience and agility
- Cannot easily leverage the data stored in these legacy systems
- Hinders digital transformation
Unless these challenges are tackled, insurance businesses will falter and become incompetent in the face of the rapidly evolving business landscape.
Low-code platforms have proven to be a quick and simple solution for insurers in helping them craft an omnichannel experience for customers, enabling them to link their legacy systems to ensure digital innovation.
Are rip and replace of legacy systems the only option for insurers for digital transformation?
No! Low-code development presents insurance businesses with various opportunities and options to modernize their core systems- from completely ripping and replacing legacy systems to bridging the gap with APIs to migration, depending on the need, budget and phase of digital transformation.
For insurance carriers who are looking to reduce risk yet accelerate enterprise innovation, low-code APIs are the ideal solution that can help to bridge the gap between legacy and digital. Leading low-code platforms like Mendix can help to quickly connect a modern, fast, front-end to a complex enterprise back-end with enterprise-level APIs, that act as an efficient interface built to ensure a seamless workflow and transaction expediency. This will simplify the process of retiring or modernizing systems.
Low-code enables the quick and simplified designing of APIs which is the core of this solution that enables a hassle-free development of front-end insurance applications. With APIs, the need for enterprise systems validation and regression testing becomes almost nonexistent and significantly reduces the time to implement a new front-end application. Combining a low-code platform with business-level mainframe native APIs can dramatically accelerate digital transformation. It’s ideal for insurers that rely heavily on their legacy application portfolio for accurate and timely insurance quotes and policy information.
Low-code platforms like Mendix provide insurers an escape route from the heavy dependence on legacy systems, especially those perturbed by massive technology overhaul and the hassles, data loss, and expenditure that follows.
Thus, low-code APIs can solve some of the key challenges for insurers related to legacy systems like:
- Enable insurers to engage better with customers, thus facilitating new customer acquisitions, retaining existing customers, improving customer loyalty and thus boosting revenues, all the while building and deploying these applications within a very short span like weeks or even days.
- Encourage better connection with cloud platforms, partner systems and link back to companies’ own systems of record.
- Streamline and optimize key internal business processes and operations of insurers through automation and more.
- Ensure better compliance and offer enhanced data quality.
- Capabilities to leverage large amounts of data that is locked away in legacy systems through interactive dashboards, providing real-time information and ensuring better decision-making.
- Better competitive advantage through unparalleled customer experience across all touchpoints, quality of offering, flexibility, ease-of-use, etc.
Intelion Systems has partnered with leading low code platform Mendix to offer insurance businesses a unified platform to enable insurance businesses to leverage APIs to decompose monolithic applications and eliminate system complexity to increase business agility.
Intelion is one of the leading contenders in the industry to support digital transformation in the insurance industry through low-code covering all lines of business, and through omnichannel capabilities to improve the customer experience.
