Group benefits insurers face continuous pressure on margins, while true sales growth remains challenging. This, in combination with the price sensitivity of plan sponsors, makes operations efficiency and improved marketing across multiple channels key drivers pushing insurers towards improved digital capabilities.
Carriers are seeking modern systems that can better support rapid product development and self-service capabilities, along with pricing and product changes. These modern systems are also crucial for attracting and retaining top distribution talent. By automating benefits administration and enrollment, and integrating with other core systems, insurers can address competitive concerns from both functional and financial perspectives.
Analytics are widely used for voluntary products, with applications that include enrollment, claims fraud identification, member conservation, sales reporting, underwriting, and more.
Carriers are also considering where to go next as there is no clear standard for group benefits information exchange. While ACORD has proposed an enrollment standard, traction is uncertain.
Insurance carriers are heavily focused on their bread-and-butter issues of product design, enrollment, marketing, and continuing to improve administrative systems. Even though innovation is taking a back seat to execution, carriers are expressing increased concern over, and interest in, the need for digital capabilities.
Group benefits CIOs and business executives should consider the following top technology priorities: solid product design that attracts a broad audience, ranging from entry-level offerings to more complex, high-end products; sales, marketing, and enrollment tools to support complex products and automate processes; robust and flexible group administration capabilities to understand characteristics and sales opportunities; multi-channel marketing and sales to gain market efficiencies and leverage cross-selling opportunities; and additional administrative capabilities in peripheral areas to improve transaction and payment handling.
More on this can be found at: https://dev-novarica.pantheonsite.io/business-and-technology-trends-group-life-annuity-voluntary-benefits/.
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