Reporting from Celent’s Model Insurer Asia Summit

If 2015 was the year of FinTech, 2016 will surely be the year that InsurTech comes into its own. Celent has been presenting our views on InsurTech and emerging technologies at insurance conferences throughout Asia for some time now, so naturally we see this as a welcome—and inevitable—development.

We held our 7th Annual Model Insurer Asia Awards event in Singapore last month, with presentations focusing on InsurTech and digital financial services. Celent Research Director Karlyn Carnahan set the tone with a keynote presentation on the challenges facing insurers as customers are increasingly seeking real-time, digital interactions tailored to their personal needs and channel preferences. Karlyn outlined the steps to becoming a digital insurer and provided many insights on how insurers can embrace the digital paradigm. In the afternoon session, Karlyn also led a peer-to-peer discussion on how insurers in Asia are responding to these significant changes in the digital landscape.

We were delighted to have GoBear, one of the stars of Asia InsurTech, on the program. GoBear is an online financial services aggregator with a decidedly digital offering that is expanding at a remarkably fast pace throughout Southeast Asia. In his keynote presentation, GoBear’s CEO Andre Hesselink discussed how his firm developed their product with the goal of better serving consumers while at the same time satisfying the business needs of their suppliers, the insurance carriers. Quite the balancing act I am sure.

Celent Analyst KyongSun Kong presented the results of Celent’s annual Asia Insurance CIO survey, revealing that nearly 80% of insurers surveyed are engaged in digital transformation initiatives.

Finally, we came to the heart of the event: the Model Insurer Asia Awards themselves. This year we celebrated best-practice technology initiatives at 14 insurers, including ICICI Lombard General Insurance, Taikang Insurance, multinationals Aegon and MetLife, and online insurance innovator DirectAsia, among many others. All winning initiatives are profiled in our report Celent Model Insurer Asia 2016: Case Studies of Effective Technology Use in Insurance.

from Insurance Blog http://ift.tt/1TEt2xU
via IFTTT