Low Code Platforms and Insurance: Is the Future Truly Digital?

In the past 25 years, organizations have relied on complex applications to solve business problems. Whether they’re problems related to Tech, Sales, Accounting or Supply Chain, every business requires automation to streamline processes. 

Enterprise software solutions provide a framework of business functions. Every company seeking these solutions has to adapt to the application to adopt it. The transition phase can take months at times or even years and it still leaves you with gaps that you are yearning to fill.

The alternative is customized software tailored to your business’s needs. Although this sounds like the perfect solution, here’s where customized solutions can go wrong:

·      They cost a lot.

·      They can’t be scaled.

·      They don’t smoothly run applications.

·      They rely too much on individuals to manage them.

Companies are then left with a tough decision. Do they buy an enterprise solution and spend months adopting to its complications? Or do they splurge money on a customized solution that has set backs of its own?

The gap created by this dilemma is where Low Code/No Code platforms steps in.

Introducing Low Code

Low code  is a professional approach to application development. It allows developers of mixed experience levels and backgrounds to produce applications for web and mobile using drag and drop components and modern graphics for great user interface.

Low code platforms allow business users to create applications without writing code, while professional developers enjoy the flexibility to customize and enhance the applications they built. Working together, developers in the business and IT can create, iterate and release applications in a fraction of the time it takes traditional coding methods.

Such application development platforms enable production of a full range of apps for various use cases across different industries. These applications range from upgrading legacy to IOT enabled smart applications.

A low code platform is a flexible and easy to understand design space that business people can get creative with and fully understand.

To put it into perspective, imagine the Tesla factory: the machines involved in the automation are not responsible for design but they do accelerate the production process. That’s sort of what low code does too.

But low code is no longer the new kid on the block! If you’re looking for a low code platform, you need to understand the differences between each platform. Here are the five main types.

General Purpose

This type of low code platform lets you build an application that can be deployed anywhere and serves a variety of needs.

Process

These low code platforms focus specifically on business processes like work flows, forms, and integrations with other systems. These platforms are the optimal choice if an organization wants to go paperless.

Mobile Application Development Platform (MADP)

These low code platforms are used to code, launch or test mobile applications. You can use these platforms to dock the application to other mobile platforms.

Database

Database low code platforms only allow access to pull data from databases inside the system. They are suitable if you need to feed large amounts of data into a system in less time.

Request Handling

These low code platforms can only handle processing requests for fixed processes.

Low Code for Insurance Companies

Low code has the potential to revolutionize our future. Every business can leverage this platform to their advantage, especially industries that have high compliance requirements like the Insurance industry. Insurance companies have to operate within a set of guidelines or pay hefty penalties.

In the last few decades, insurance companies have implemented all manner of administration software, but core functions like licensing, financial reporting and data privacy are still very much traditional. This constraint limits transparency for employees and auditors.

The insurance sector in general, be it Property and Casualty, Life or Reinsurance, needs a framework that automates processes on a whole. A low code platform is the ideal foundation for that framework. Low code has the speed to build applications quickly, modify them, while also providing transparency.

Because of a consistent focus on business process management, insurers rarely get the time to improve customer experience. With low code, insurance companies can break away from process difficulties.

Some of the leading low code platforms are cloud-based. They are available through yearly subscriptions, which allow companies to start with low initial investments. Low code also eliminates the need for staff training after new software is implemented.

Since the business processes involved come from the minds of your business resources and are completely customized, the user experience is self explanatory. Easy implementation and little or no training also means minimal implementation cost. 

Low code also changes things for the customer’s end. The post digital consumer wants flexible policies that are updated in real time, as per their need. A bad user experience and long backlogs can decrease the customer’s experience.

Benefits for Insurance

A low code application platform streamlines processes for any business and frees up a lot of time. They don’t eliminate the need for developers, though. Insurance companies realized that it needed full-time developers to respond to rapidly-evolving organizational requirements. Because they were revenue-strapped, they used low code to build the application they required.

On top of saving time, money and effort, low code is also about enabling people to solve their own problems and giving people power in their hands. And this power is not only for people with coding or app development background – anyone with an idea can do it.

Low code platforms improve the speed of your IT department’s processes. Because of it, the IT function focuses less on the raw coding needed to create applications and more on the ideation. This takes small development projects off their plates saving hours that they can spend on something more productive!

Low code also gets rid of the problems of shadow IT. Usually in companies, when the IT department can’t fix a problem, people take matters into their own hands. Because of the rise SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms, these solutions aren’t hard to find. This is where low code development platforms come into play. The user has the ability to create their own business solutions while letting IT control the data and user access.

The insurance sector is traditionally an early adopter of new technologies. According to Mckinsey, insurers can double their profits by digitizing their business. Routine activities like quote, purchase, policy documents, renewal, claims (processing) require the least amount of human intervention and can be highly customized.

Farsighted insurance companies also understand the potential threat from companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook. Their huge pool of data about the customer can enable them to provide customized insurance products.

Threats like these just add to the pressure and that’s not all. When it comes to automation, insurance companies face a few challenges.

Challenges Faced by Insurance Companies

Scattered Data

Data is collected both on paper and electronically in the insurance industry. Integrating all of that on to software can be a time consuming process.

Manual Processes

Insurance companies have a lot of processes which are labor-intensive and repetitive. Tasks like:

·      Underwriting

·      Renewing Premium

·      Conducting Compliance

Summing Up

Many activities that we carry out today have the potential to be automated. For business owners, these shifts create uncertainty and benefits. As technology grows at an incredible pace, software companies are making enormous leaps in making coding easy for everyone.

Platforms like low code let you design and host applications without having to write a single line of code. The future is about making coding easy and low code gives everyone the opportunity to develop rather than the 1% that specialize to do it.

Some people want to keep coding highly exclusive, but to the rest of us, platforms like low code open up a new world of opportunities. Because of low code, enterprise software providers will have to simplify their solutions for faster integration.

To keep up with the challenge posed to them by low code, developers will have to charge less for customized solutions. It’ll also mean that in the coming years we’ll see a complete new industry for programmers, enabling faster application development. It will also be a lot easier for startups to provide their products to the public without having to wait for investments or funds.

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