Special Ep: Ian Summers AdvantageGo and Jeff Cohen Zywave: Let the client choose what they want
Today’s episode showcases a really important advancement in the provision of technology to the insurance industry. Back in the early days of computerisation we installed different systems in our businesses to do different jobs. We didn’t expect them to talk to each other. And because each was made of proprietary tech – they almost certainly didn’t.Nowadays we want systems to ingest data sources and the output of other systems and we expect these new outputs to be easily ingestible further down the chain by our own suppliers and all the different departments of our business as well as regulators and other essential third parties. Common standards and modern connectivity are allowing this to happen. I suppose this is the difference between computerisation and digitisation.But this begs a change in the way technology providers go about their business. Either they will try to be all things to all people and produce their best attempts at solving every problem and answering every question that the insurance industry is trying to answer, or they will have to be more realistic and pragmatic. In a world brimming with excellent providers of increasingly specialist solutions, many are realising that the best outcomes for customers are going to come about when they are provided with a wide array of choice and ease of operation. A customer should be able to run different tools on the same platform without having to become an expert in plugging them all together themselves. Tech providers should be doing this for them and making their lives easy. There should also be the possibility of choosing between different competing options for certain tasks. This strategy is called an ecosystem approach and it is what we are going to be getting deep into today. To help us I spoke to Ian Summers Global Business Leader of AdvantageGo and Jeff Cohen who is a Senior Vice President at Zywave. Ian and Jeff are vastly experienced in their fields. Ian is the architect of the AdvantageGo ecosystem idea and Zywave is a core member of this affiliation. You absolutely don’t have to be a techie to find this discussion useful and Ian and Jeff are really approachable and good at explaining things to laypeople like me.Half an hour with these two and I guarantee you’ll be excited about the possibilities that a genuinely digitised insurance world are going to open up for all of us, not least in a brave new AI-enabled world. NOTES AND ABBREVIATIONS:We mentioned ISO, which is the Insurance Services Office.API is Application Programming Interface.ECF is the Electronic Claims File used in the London Market.LINKS:Learn more about AdvantageGo’s ecosystem here:https://www.advantagego.com/ecosystem/Expect more additions as time progresses.