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Insurance compliance brings growth opportunities

By Angelique Strumpher, Manager at SilverBridge Holdings

Johannesburg, 26 Apr 2021

Insurers should view the changing regulatory environment as an opportunity to redouble their focus on innovation, introducing more product flexibility and enhancing customer experience with a data-driven understanding of their unique requirements. This will see an enabling transformative shift that will redefine the industry for a digitally led landscape.

Regulatory technology is emerging that uses sophisticated analytics, data integration, intelligent process automation, machine learning and other emerging technologies to help drive the modernisation of the insurance compliance function. It encompasses the monitoring of sales, claims and complaints processes that include identifying fraud and treating the customer fairly while adhering to regulatory requirements. Using these solutions empowers insurers to automate many of the administrative-intensive tasks around meeting regulatory standards, giving them more freedom to focus on product development and strategic growth.

Understanding the process

Knowing how to manage the modernisation and digitalisation processes needed for this new environment will become a critical factor to successfully transition to a cloud-driven operation that balances adherence to compliance with improvements in customer experience through more tailored engagements. In fact, those insurers able to use data and analytics to not only improve their core operations are also able to introduce new business models better suited to the demanding, real-time expectations of end-users and regulatory bodies.

Insurers that have implemented advanced analytics solutions to manage and administrate compliance are outperforming their competition. So, while it might be difficult to look beyond the complexities typically associated with remaining compliant, attention is now on customer experience and using technology to transform engagements with policy holders, brokers and financial advisors to benefit them in their daily lives. By modernising risk, compliance and governance processes, insurers can pursue their core mission while building a robust and resilient risk management framework that enables regulatory reporting and anticipates future regulatory changes.

Reputation management

Insurers, like any other organisation in the financial services sector, can ill afford to be non-compliant. The financial and reputational risks are significant. Modernised regulatory technology is therefore essential to manage both internal systemic processes as well as employees to put the foundation in place that an insurer complies with all relevant policies and regulatory principles.

A robust, digitally enabled compliance management system provides an insurer with a competitive advantage that can elevate the business with a differentiated product offering. Because this will help streamline existing processes, less time is needed on compliance monitoring while enabling the insurer to create workflows that support scalability in a corporate responsible manner.

Innovation and new technologies can therefore combine to positively enhance the insurance value proposition without being limited by traditional compliance efforts. Having the flexibility to adapt and scale according to growth requirements, while automating much of the regulatory environment, will position insurers strongly as we further embrace today’s digital environment.

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SilverBridge

With extensive experience in designing and implementing solutions for retail and corporate long-term insurers, including pensions and employee benefits, SilverBridge is one of the largest providers of specialised technology solutions to emerging markets. Its experience also includes the development of artificial intelligence and robotic process automation solutions not only for insurance, but also in the banking industry.