As insurers look to the next horizon of expansion with an inclusive and diverse approach, there are a number of opportunities influencing scale potential including acquisitions, capital investments, the metaverse and the emergence of insurtech 2.0.

In this month’s Insurance News Analysis, Joanne Laffan and I discuss how a pre-scale insurer like Lemonade is planning to leapfrog its competitors through its recent acquisition of Metromile, a pay-per-mile car insurance company.

With the advent of Ethereum Merge in an effort to combat the carbon-intense energy consumption from blockchain in cryptocurrency, we discuss what it means for insurers’ capital investments as they’re trying to stay on top of both new technology and net zero targets.

We also discuss some of the early ways we expect to see the metaverse impact insurers’ operations and their customer and employee experiences. Plus we focus on the implications of so-called ‘insurtech 2.0’ which emerged as

What role will insurance play in the future? How can insurers work with customers and parallel industries to create tangible value and make a positive impact on our planet? These are some of the questions answered in the Qorus-Accenture Innovation in Insurance Trends Report, which is out now.  I believe that this year’s trends show how insurers and their partners are reinventing themselves to support the evolving needs of their customers, intermediaries and employees.

The report gathers rich and diverse data from the hundreds of submissions received by the Qorus-Accenture Innovation in Insurance Awards, an annual awards program that celebrates the wide range of innovations shaping the future of the industry, from smart, collaborative ecosystems to compelling uses of AI and more. From vaccination incentive programs to remote claims assessment solutions and AI-enabled health checks, this year’s awards showed clear trends in insurance innovation and illustrated how innovation

The metaverse is a concept making headlines across the globe, with its application being imagined across all industries. However, until recently, the practical manifestation and future impact of the metaverse was unknown. The newly-released Insurance Tech Vision for 2022 not only defines the metaverse, but contains valuable, timely insights for insurers on how the metaverse is ushering in the next wave of digital change.

Accenture defines the “Metaverse Continuum” as a spectrum of digitally enhanced worlds, realities and business models poised to revolutionize life and enterprise in the next decade. This applies across all aspects of business, from consumer to worker and across the enterprise; from reality to virtual and back. The metaverse continuum is being built on a wide range of mature and emerging technologies. These technologies include artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), blockchain, digital twins, edge technologies, cloud, digital currencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), social platforms,

In a market that calls on insurers to be agile and digitize at scale, an insurer’s mainframe can either catalyze or inhibit progress. While the mainframe was once a valuable core technological function, many legacy mainframes lack the agility to meet the demands of customer expectations and rapid digital progress.

The call for mainframe modernization

Insurers want to reach a digital end-state and embed the enabling functions they need to perform in the cloud using a route that is faster, better, and cheaper. Modernizing the mainframe is the last mile towards enabling business capabilities, reimagining the business and driving a cloud operating model.

If we look at the market forces shaping the wider industry, insurers are being called upon to be more agile so as to keep pace with rapidly changing demands. This is due to a range of factors, from higher inflationary environment expenses for insurance operations and increasing

This post is part of a series sponsored by AgentSync.

For MGAs and MGUs looking to own the future of their distribution channels, having a reputational advantage with downstream agencies and maintaining a stellar producer experience is mission critical. To help, AgentSync has released a report, Four Producer Barriers to Your MGA’s Expanding Market Share.

Insurance has long been dominated by producer-led sales, a trend that’s likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Yet, managing general agencies and managing general underwriters often sit in the middle of a distribution channel, parked between carriers and smaller agencies and producers.

These MGAs and MGUs face unique challenges in breaking through the industry noise to prove their worth to players on both the upstream and downstream sides of the sales pipeline.

For a quick look into how to turn compliance into your biggest producer experience superpower, download our checklist, Eight Steps to