No-Code Platforms and Cloud-Based Tech for the Insurer of the Future

In this interview, the President and CEO of Innoveo, Amir Ghaffar, discusses how new insurtech, such as business APIs and cloud-based tech, are changing the insurance landscape and bringing the industry into a new, fast-paced and consumer-focused era. His company empowers business innovation by leveraging the latest technology to enable business specialists to focus on creating new business models, processes, and products without caring about the underlying platform.

Keep reading to learn how Innoveo's flagship product, Innoveo Skye?, is using both incremental or disruptive innovation to transform the industry.

What problem did you set out to solve when founding Innoveo?

Innoveo started as a spin-off of a major Swiss insurance company. It was founded by a group of IT and insurance experts who realized that many insurers had similar pain points: the need to very quickly launch new insurance products and services to succeed in an increasingly competitive and interconnected market. New distribution channels such as direct sales and bancassurance were on the rise, the classical insurance value chain was gradually decomposing, and processes needed to be digitalized to achieve higher levels of efficiency. A big hurdle, however, was the lack of flexibility within carriers’ legacy systems, which didn’t generally support the adaptation of products to different geographies, multiple currencies and languages, or new distribution channels.

Innoveo empowers business innovation by leveraging the latest technology to enable business specialists to focus on creating new business models, processes, and products without caring about the underlying platform.

Our flagship product, Innoveo Skye?, is a no-code platform that allows non-technical people to configure custom-built applications without coding a single line, while also being integrated into complex IT landscapes. This results in very high implementation speed, adaptability, and cost-effectiveness. While some insurers may use the platform to build customer portals for direct channels, others can use it to build agent and broker portals to distribute any insurance product across all lines of business (P&C, Life, A&H, personal and specialty lines) or to digitalize any process (underwriting, claims, risk assessments, quote & bind, and more). 

Our early adoption of agile principles allowed us to reinvent and adjust along the way. Innoveo Skye? is enhanced monthly with new capabilities and the latest technologies, allowing customers to benefit from state-of-the-art solutions. 

Why develop a cloud-based technology suite and why should insurers prefer cloud over server-based technology?

After rejecting the cloud-based approach for several years, the insurance market has recently come around to its many benefits. These days, the trend towards using cloud technology is predominant, even for insurers. 

Cloud technology provides many advantages, including consolidation, standardization, speed and efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. We are this way able to give back to our customers more attractive pricing, speed to market, scalability, transparency, reliability, and security. Adjusting to business needs, we can start with a single product and dynamically scale up to include multiple products across omnichannel digital distribution - not only the hardware but also the architecture and applications themselves. Providing a SaaS rather than “a software on a hardware” makes it possible to adjust the services in a transparent way to match the needs of our customers.

We have standardized and automatized the setup of our infrastructure environment, including servers and database on Amazon Web Services. Our customers are distributed across Europe, USA, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and we can serve them everywhere. 

This approach has allowed us to build more than 100 applications on 5 different continents for some of the biggest insurance players such as Zurich, Allianz, Chubb, and RSA. Being fast and nimble, our technology has also empowered Insurtech companies to materialize innovative ideas and bring them to the market. 

Do you think API is the new insurtech trend, seeing that you use Innoveo Skye API to ease the integration process?

API is definitively an insurtech trend. Established insurance companies are renewing their application landscape and reshaping the underlying architectures and technologies. This evolution is enabling interaction between carriers and other market players, ecosystem platforms, as well as intelligent services offered by specialized services providers. At Innoveo, we’ve always adopted the idea of implementing “loosely coupled” integrations, this implies an open architecture. We’ve built a very flexible integration layer which supports communication with any kind of back-end or third-party system, whether using synchronous or asynchronous mechanisms. Innoveo Skye?’s flexible APIs are a fundamental advantage for insurance market players who want to integrate with third parties and benefit from a very fast speed to market. 

The latest outcome of this approach is using our Innoveo Skye? platform to build global end-to-end insurance solutions which can easily be used locally through the availability of business APIs. 

Open architectures are not new; Uber, Google, Airbnb and others are providing business APIs already. They give access to their concrete, fine-grained business values, which can be combined and re-assembled to create new propositions. The same is currently happening in Insurance, APIs are used to provide micro insurances, usage-based insurances, and even classical all-risk insurances that can be embedded into new business ideas – even outside of the insurance business. This open approach was initiated by aggregators 15 years ago, continued with travel insurances in travel portals or flight booking systems and guarantee extensions in tech online shops, now it’s being adopted by IoT devices, cars, and many other aspects of everyday life. Countless new business propositions will follow. With Innoveo eBro, our broker platform, we will provide concrete APIs to connect risk analysis, risk coverage, and risk mitigation in different areas like Cyber for SMEs. 

How do you plan to scale and expand your company?

Innoveo has built its flagship product Innoveo Skye? as a “no-code platform” even before this term had been coined by market analysts. We have collected a great deal of experience in how to support the fast development of new applications and how to let them interact with other systems. This technology allows us to build our own business solutions and offer them to the insurance and finance market.

We are now launching “Innoveo eBro” - our standard solutions for brokers and insurance companies focused on the SME market and introduce it in the USA and Europe. Additionally, a bancassurance platform which connects with multiple insurance companies will be launched in the Middle East mid of this year with one of the biggest local banks. New technologies like NLP, AI, and IoT will be integrated with our platform in these propositions. 

We continue to grow our business using our flexible no-code platform, enabling new customers to build custom enterprise level applications fast! This is especially useful for customers who want an individual, tailor-made solution. Additionally, we also offer new end-to-end business solutions powered by Innoveo Skye?, addressing targeted markets and business needs by becoming the ecosystem platform enabler.

Our plan includes launching the following four different end-to-end solutions: 

INNOVEO eBro - an SME platform for brokers which compares quotes from different insurers and issues policies directly into their backend systems. 

INNOVEO Venture - an SME platform for insurers which can be used across all distribution channels.

INNOVEO Touch - an employee benefit solution which can be integrated into other portals – employed recently for a big Asian payroll provider who is offering insurance coverages in his payroll portal. 

INNOVEO Cyber - A cyber risk management platform which includes a cyber risk assessment followed by cyber coverage (risk transfer) and cyber services (professional cyber risk consulting).

How do you attract the likes of large insurers globally to use your platform and not invest in their own proprietary technology?

At Innoveo we are currently in discussion with a large number of new customers who are interested in using our platform for the following purpose:

Increase Sales

• Engage with new distribution partners.
• Quote and bind for customers and brokers.
• Product bundling/New pricing model.

Customer Satisfaction/Efficiency

• B2E applications (e.g. endorsements, underwriting).
• Customer service portals (e.g. claims registration).
• Automation of existing manual processes.

Digitalization/Modernization

• Provide state of the art digital experiences.
• Implement new business models.
• Create new ecosystems.

Front-end technologies are changing rapidly, our platform evolves with new technologies, supports all insurance lines of business and processes, and integrates with third-party systems, this gives our customers the comfort of being able to focus purely on their business requirements. Large insurance companies are particularly challenged when trying to find synergies between specific regional and local requirements. Standardizing solutions across regions to cope with the increasing cost pressure requires a flexible and adjustable platform.

Innoveo’s value proposition consists of a rich front-end solution that allows insurers to become digital market players without investing in expensive, risky, and long-lasting legacy system replacements, which can cause them to miss market opportunities. Innoveo Skye? has the ability to talk to several backend systems at the same time. Thus, once the frontend capabilities have been installed, migration processes can happen “behind the scenes” in a second phase without hindering the sales capabilities of an insurance company. 

Innoveo Skye? is a technology which allows insurance companies to become a market player in an increasingly connected world in which business opportunities are won or lost based on a carrier’s ability to interact with ecosystems and distribution partners at the points of sale and market players who offer complementary products and services. 

Is Innoveo focused on incremental or disruptive innovation to the insurance industry? Which is more impactful?

The answer to this question is - both! We’ve built our flexible platform incrementally to help insurance companies and start-ups who want to drastically improve their speed to market. Incremental changes are necessary to enable this speed by established companies that at the same time need to respect their existing distribution channels - like brokers and agencies- and also respect their existing backend policy administration systems and organizational structure.

We are now making use of this same flexibility and advantages to build disruptive innovation ourselves. One of our latest business solutions, Innoveo eBro, is a platform that connects different market players to solve specific customer needs like cyber risk awareness, protection, and insurance for corporates as well as full risk analysis and coverage for entrepreneurs and existing SMEs. We will allow insurers and distributors an easy path to participate in this ecosystem, which will provide to them a huge variety of business connections and a pay-as-you-go, transaction-based cost model. This marketplace model increases speed to market and lowers the business risk for each participating customer.

We expect the impact (but the risk also) to be higher with disruptive innovation. Our strategy is to benefit from the flexibility of our solution by offering it to market players and at the same time become a market player ourselves.

You can learn more about Innoveo and their front-to-end solutions for insurers by visiting their website.