Here are the 5 key technologies in Asian insurers' digitalisation push

They lead in investment, in-memory analytics, and cloudbased analytics solutions.

When China’s Taikang Life Insurance found its sales agents increasingly struggling to recommend the best products to their customers, it embarked on an ambitious data analytics project to provide insight into its 45-million strong clientele. The customer data set comprised 600 attributes from demographics to financial situation and policy information, and resulted in a model that captures customer characteristics. Slowly but surely, the conventional insurance sector is penetrating the digital landscape amidst the rise of insurtech and the expansion of non-traditional players.

As insurers step up their digital game, five technologies emerge as major fields of play: cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchain. In Asia-Pacific, insurers are leading in the area of investment and in-memory analytics as well as cloudbased analytics solutions. Oliver Wyman and ZhongAn Insurance noted in a report that the investment in cloud computing, in particular, shows that insurers are prioritising agility to support innovation.

Meanwhile, APAC’s insurance sector has almost the same characteristics as the Latin America sector, revealing how legacy systems in emerging regions are less-siloed. “IT transformations in emerging countries and regions will be smoother compared to more mature regions where legacy systems have become complex enough,” noted Cliff Sheng, partner at Oliver Wyman, citing data from the report.

Furthermore, APAC places top priority on customer segmentation analytics, compared to EMEA and North America, which shows the emphasis on maximising growth in emerging markets. Insurers in APAC have also considered the susceptibility of their regions to natural disasters, hence, they have placed a higher emphasis on catastrophe simulation as a means to effectively manage risk over time.

Leading technology
For most of the insurance sector across the globe, applications based on cloud computing, telematics, and big data have already made great strides in terms of innovation, but applications from big data, AI, and blockchain have yet to really make an impact. For instance, ZhongAn Insurance, the first insurer with 6 billion policies in the cloud, instituted ZhongAn Technology to export its strong technology capabilities to other insurance companies and other financial services and non-financial services companies.

In terms of big data, China leads in the innovation and application, due to the large quantity of big data generated from a large number of ecosystems. “China has a more open attitude towards data sharing and usage, alongside the need for more infrastructure such as credit bureaus,” Sheng said.

Meanwhile, 49% of the region’s insurers believe their competitors derive value from big data technology, with 20% thinking that their peers are using big data to roll out innovative propositions. Sheng said that views are more polarised in APAC since on the flip side, the region also has the highest proportion of big data skeptics at 13%, which think “the business case for the technology is still uncertain.”