From multiple APIs down to one: The benefits of an insurtech capability platform
According to the latest Data Pipeline’s Market Study, almost 90% of respondents in Financial Services believe that data integration is critical or very important to their industry, and yet only 36% are extremely satisfied with their current approaches to this essential task.
Part of this is the sheer number of integrations that organizations need to utilize to build what appear to be simple tasks. In Insurance in particular, as companies digitise their insurance processes, they are finding that they need to connect to an increasing number of data sources.
What does this look like in practice?
Let’s take just one example, a digital quote and buy process. The data integrations for this may include;
- Validating the customer’s identity
- Undertaking a credit check
- Querying social graph data
- Checking against fraud databases, and
- pulling vehicle or property data
Of course, if you can successfully manage this complexity, then every data integration makes the customer experience leaner, faster, and more accurate in terms of risk assessment. While for commercial clients, an understanding of their ownership structure and exact geographical footprint often prevents quote and buy processes from being automated, there’s an opportunity here for disruptors. With 60% of purchased policies being sold by the insurer who provides the fastest quote, a more automated process can create outsize growth in the form of sales results.
The good news is that data service providers now almost ubiquitously make their services available via an API. That means that in theory at least, it is now easier than ever to access the data you need. However, in reality, many of these services exist in a silo. The bad news is that the sheer number of integrations leads to a high cost of ownership for building and maintaining these services in-house.
What can a platform approach do for my business?
Our customers use our insurtech functionality platform as a gateway to a wide variety of data, data analytics and AI services. A single integration with us, rather than a growing number with each new data source.
Here are just some of the benefits of taking a platform approach as opposed to building point-to-point integrations with open-source data or 3rd party insurtechs;
- Agility: A platform acts as a hub-and-spoke, enabling you to access dozens of data services from different providers from a single place. Connect once to the platform and no further integration work is required for adding the next service you need. Rather than adding an additional API round-hop to the process, our platform can return the data you need in a single call.
- Zero CapEx: Accessing 3rd party data services via a platform aggregator is considerably cheaper than buying direct, not to mention night and day from building in-house. You can avoid added spend such as set-up fees and minimum monthly usage and contract term commitments, all of which have previously made the service you want a non-starter.
- Low OpEx: The transactional price per API call can also be significantly cheaper via the platform, with SMS costs being on average 33% cheaper and vehicle data up to 10 times cheaper than traditional vendors such as Experian. With a no-code toolkit to automate insurance processes, you’re also saving on development costs every time you make a change.
- Less Risk: Whilst you may love that new AI start-up, the reality is that you are at risk by leaning on their services while they are still inexperienced. Consuming their service via the platform will mean that they have been put through their paces, and it also offers a degree of protection once live.
- Future-Proof: Needs change over time, and you can’t guarantee what will be tomorrow’s top priority. If you’ve developed a direct integration that you no longer want to support, that means ripping out and replacing the service. With a platform acting as a layer of abstraction, the switch can be as easy as a single parameter change.
Want to learn more about consuming insurtech functionality in the cloud via insurtech APIs? Visit www.claimtechnology.co.uk or send the team a message at hello@claimtechnology.co.uk
