Digitisation is reshaping risk management and underwriting efficiency

Risk management can be the “poster child” for digitisation because of its ability to make processes more efficient and to take large amounts of data and quickly identify threats and opportunities. 

That is the view of Michael Bell, managing director of SS&C Technologies’ Insurance Solutions unit, who will moderate a forum on insurance solutions at the Bermuda Risk summit today. 

SS&C, a sponsor of the Summit and a leading provider of technology solutions to the financial services industry, is hosting the afternoon forum, which will dive into current trends that are significantly impacting investment accounting, risk analytics, digital transformation, and data warehouse requirements for commercial carriers, captives and risk retention groups.

Bell said a focus of the Forum will be on digitisation. He said that established insurance companies often grappled with the challenge of upgrading legacy systems to meet new demands. 

“What's exciting is it brings leading carriers and service providers together to discuss pertinent market issues and trends impacting the industry and on the operational side, digital transformations of those legacy systems which many carriers have,” he said. 

 “Legacy systems are hard to evolve, there's no question. Sometimes the start-ups or smaller new entrants have an advantage in that they don't carry the legacy systems with them. But rather than a complete redo, you can look at how you evolve those legacy systems and begin to digitise and apply new technologies to help modernise those legacy applications.” 

He said digitisation was of immediate value in improving operational efficiency. 

“We see it on the asset side where you can automate regular and fairly routine tasks, you can put digitisation to them and significantly improve efficiency,” he added. 

Digitisation had moved rapidly in the last two or three years and companies could now see where the processes improved efficiency. 

“There is a lot of lift that comes from that,” he said. “In addition to taking processes to truly new levels, when you can think about all the data that can be simultaneously and constructively processed and analysed in a different way. 

“So risk management is the poster child for pulling in both assets and liabilities and scenario testing them and underwriting is another area where so you can get very specific and pinpoint risk and exposures and underwrite it in a more precise way. 

“Claims adjudication is another area where the speed in which you can work through processing the claim makes a difference.”

Bell said the Forum will also discuss generative artificial intelligence, which he said was still in its infancy. 

Noting that it was primarily being used at the customer service level in insurance now, he added that it had potential to change the way data is analysed. 

“It’s an evolution of digitisation, but we are beginning to see AI being used for credit analysis on the security underwriting side, for collateral optimisation – optimising what securities are pledged and so forth.” 

He added: “It's really freeing up people's time to do that more value added work in the analysis. It’s obviously really important with all this that these AI models can't be left unchecked. You need management of the models, governance and oversight of them.” 

Other participants in the Forum are: Andy Aziz, Chief Strategy Officer & Head of Product, SS&C Algorithmics; Scott Kurland, Managing Director, SS&C; Choisel Murray, Deputy Managing Director, Aon; Anup Seth, CEO, Agam-Bermuda; Dave Wilson, Senior Account Executive, SS&C Intralinks; and Concetta Yates, VP Customer Strategy and Industry Solutions, SS&C Blue Prism, Americas. 

The forum takes place at 3:00pm in the Harbourview Ballroom at the Hamilton Princess Hotel. 

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