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Insurance Technology

Insurance is on the verge of a tech-driven disruption that will fundamentally change how insurance products are created, distributed, and used. Our experts are well versed in both business and technology and are ready to draw on this knowledge to tackle the industry’s most pressing issues.

Our tech-forward, integrated perspective covers all parts of the value chain—from underwriting and pricing to distribution and claims. And our deep insights from serving clients help industry executives and policy makers chart a path forward, understand tech-driven trends, and safeguard the lives and livelihoods of individuals and communities.

What we do

Transform IT

We enhance IT foundations and delivery to support a tech-driven strategy by leveraging product- and platform-operating models, productivity, agile in IT and DevOps, IT sourcing, and cyber.

Transform the carrier

We integrate business and IT along the insurance value chain through accelerating the return on investment for tech modernization, automation, digital, and data and analytics.

Transform the insurance ecosystem

We build tech-based ecosystems for noninsurers, such as automotive companies, and help indirect companies achieve profitable growth.

Examples of our work

Modernizing the core IT platform

A major US life insurer acquired multiple books of businesses from different organizations and spread across seven IT systems. Its project to consolidate policies into a single system was significantly behind schedule and had achieved minimal progress over four years. Our team’s work helped the insurer achieve significant performance improvements, including a fourfold increase in throughput, elevated transparency between vendor and client, and increased responsiveness to regulatory requests. As a result, the migration was successfully delivered—with residual policies left—in two years.

Moving to the cloud

A midsized North American life insurer focused on retirement and protection wanted to move to a cloud-based IT system. We prioritized demand by moving from a project to a product mindset, created autonomous and accountable teams, drove automation as part of continuous improvement, and developed a road map to migrate workloads to the public cloud. Since the insurer had outsourced a large volume of IT projects, we also restructured service-provider contracts. Over a two-year period, the transformation saved approximately 25 percent in IT labor costs on a baseline, achieved a ten-time reduction in business-product defects, and increased capacity by two times. The client moved 40 percent of its IT footprint to the public cloud with plans to migrate more than 80 percent of the workloads over the next year.

Featured Capabilities

  • Ignite: is a core solution of McKinsey Digital, with a clear focus on diagnostics for quantifying and tracking the impact of transformations across all areas and industries.
  • Insurance 360°: leverages insurance cost and performance benchmarking and covers the complete value chain from product development to operations and support, provided by a cutting-edge knowledge team.
  • Insurance core-systems insights: uses a comprehensive insurance core-systems vendor database and offers world-class quality and unique insights into vendor capabilities, products, features, geographic coverage, and cross-vendor comparisons.
  • Insurance business value of technology: identifies and sizes tech-enabled digital and analytics opportunities across the insurance value chain, including technology-modernization levers, qualitative assessment of technology capabilities, and opportunity prioritization and impact estimations.
  • Leap: works with established organizations to imagine, build, and scale new businesses—and develop the capabilities needed to do it again and again.

Featured Insights

Article

Reaching the next normal of insurance core technology

– Now more than ever, insurers are focusing on reimagining the role of technology, reinventing technology delivery, and future-proofing the foundation of core technology. Twelve articles dive deep into the what, why, and how.
Article

Scale matters … to an extent: Playing the scale game in insurance

– Large insurers can turn their scale into a strong competitive advantage—if they recognize that fully harnessing the benefits of scale requires managing complexity.
Blog Post

Will your insurance IT investments pay off?

– According to new data from Western Europe, insurers that make larger, targeted IT investments achieve more growth and perform better than competitors with lower investments.
Article

Top ten myths of technology modernization in insurance

– Many insurers have experienced unsuccessful tech modernization efforts. To reverse this trend, insurers need to first become aware of common misconceptions—and then address them head-on.
Article

The insurance switch: Technology will reshape operations

– As insurance companies allocate more resources to technology functions, operations will need to reshape to make the most of their new tools.
Article

IT modernization in insurance: Three paths to transformation

– Insurance companies can reap significant benefits from overhauling their core IT systems. Deciding which approach to choose depends on a range of considerations.