Hot on the heels of my blog yesterday "“You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” this article about  Covéa's digital transformation caught my eye. It matches many of the insights that Celent summarised from ITC2021 in particular this one.

" Partnerships: While the theme in earlier years has been how insuretech startups would disrupt established carriers, there is a greater spirit of partnership this year. Carriers recognize the need to take new technologies and new ways of doing business seriously, and startups recognize they need to partner with carriers more on their terms."

For the insurtech success is compromised unless the insurer has a clear vision and strategy- knows why it needs to innovate and transform i.e. 

"For Iotatech director Robert Thomson, what was “really good” for Iotatech as a small company was that Covéa had a “clear vision” on what it wanted to achieve and by when."

Isobel Rafferty in The Insurance Times continues: -

"Covéa Insurance aims to “challenge the status quo” of the “same tired technology platforms by investing in a cloud-based microservice architecture, according to the insurer’s chief technology and information officer Graeme Howard.

Putting this into practice, Covéa Insurance partnered with startup insurtech Iotatech in June 2021 to launch a new data-driven platform, which currently services motor business through a product partnership with Discovery-owned insurance company Vitality."

You can see what Graeme Howard means when he says "“the whole ethos of what we’re doing is to create an ecosystem, so we can partner with large affinity partners for small insurtechs – that to me is the beauty of the architecture”. 

Ecosystems are oft-mentioned and often a vague and all embracing term. Generally it means partnerships that deliver complete products for customers rather than partial solutions. 

So it is interesting to see the Covéa-Iotatech partnership on the one hand and the recently announced Iotatech-RightIndem partnership on the other.  

RightIndem and Iotatech join forces to reduce indemnity spend and lifecycles while exceeding customer expectations

Insurtechs are maturing, realise that no one technology can deliver the complete products insurers require and are forming their own ecosystems.

Or to add another insight from Celent : -

Executing on innovation

: Carriers are realizing the key to insuretech innovation is to change the way they innovate: digital product-led, human-centered design; long-term vision but small, incremental experiments; and modern architectures that support rapid development.

Graeme Howard and Covea have certainly applied that.