The insurance industry heavily relies on and benefits from data. Whether it’s developing risk models, pricing insurance, creating new product lines, or swiftly processing claims, all of these areas rely on the frequency and quality of incoming data. However to obtain this data —especially in today’s information age — insurance companies need new ways to engage with customers, agents, and business partners, and that’s where the power of the cloud comes in.  

As more insurance consumers go online to interact, compare products, pricing, and make decisions, the volume of available customer data has grown exponentially. And cloud has become front and center in its ability to enable digital transformation, leading insurance companies to rethink the ways they harness and tap into their wealth of data—among many other things.  

This blog post explores some of the top ways insurance companies can directly benefit from cloud adoption through Google Cloud. Google Cloud, a Burwood Group partner, was built with an understanding of both the business need to move fast and transform, and the IT need to modernize at different speeds, making it one of the best platforms for innovation.

Google Cloud Use Cases for the Insurance Industry

1. Dev/Test Build Automation

   Developer productivity is foundational to any digital transformation effort. Whether that be putting in a new agent portal or implementing an online ratings system, the quickest way to grind a project to a halt is having insufficient development and test environments. The Cloud enables just-in-time provisioning and scale out of development environments. Google Cloud specifically removes a lot of the complexity of automating Dev/Test Builds. Google Cloud Build allows the automation of containers and infrastructure builds automatically, as code is deployed.

2. Web and Mobile Application Modernization

   Many insurance companies are developing new portals, mobile apps, and other applications to interface with their customers and agents. This process often requires integrating with existing applications, large scale data integration, working with third party developers, and building dev/test environments. The use of conversational interfaces, natural language processing, and chatbots represent the early stages of revolutionizing how we engage with customers and customer service. The best capabilities for this are born in the Cloud. A good example of this is Google Cloud’s DialogFlow. DialogFlow is a bot development environment and framework. A bot created with DialogFlow is multimodal so it can interface with customers on an organization’s website, mobile app, dial-in via the contact center, or social media channels. The use of bots in such capacity is making it easier and quicker to engage with customers and understand what they are looking for.

3. Driving Insights from Data

   Many insurance organizations are wrestling with Data Governance, Master Data Management, and CRM data quality. Customer data is usually spread across many systems. Newer data sources are becoming valuable, such as mobile app usage and social media feeds. Google Cloud has a leading platform for data insights and exploration in BigQuery, which allows organizations to analyze data by creating a logical data warehouse over managed, columnar storage, as well as data from object storage and spreadsheets.

4. Machine Learning Applied to Actuarial Science

   The rise in organizations with high value digital assets, the rise in cybercrime, and reputational risk have all led to insurance companies developing new insurance coverage models. Actuaries are thinking about problems in new ways and good data is vital. Rather than manually cleaning up missing values or removing valuable data from analysis, machine learning insurance models are helping actuaries automatically detect missing values and use those missing values to better predict the future. Google Cloud Machine Learning (ML) Engine is a managed service that enables developers and data scientists to build and bring superior machine learning models to production. Machine learning can free up actuaries’ time and resources to solve new problems and explore new opportunities for insurance organizations.

Clearing the Way for More Adoption Ahead

The power of cloud computing can transform the insurance industry. With the right roadmap, right solutions, and right cloud partners, your organization can solve complex problems, accelerate your digital transformation initiatives, and uncover new opportunities to reach your customers.

September 12, 2018