Annually, CGI leaders around the world meet face-to-face with business and IT executives to gather their perspectives on the trends affecting their enterprises, including business and IT priorities, IT spending, budgets and investment plans. In 2020, we conducted in-person interviews with 110 insurance client executives across the property and casualty, life and pension, and health sectors, who indicate a continued focus on meeting customer expectations for digital services.

Interviews were conducted before and after the pandemic declaration by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020, providing unique insights into evolving priorities. We provide a short summary of some of these insights here.

Meeting customer digital expectations remains top trend

 

Meeting customer digital service expectations is the top trend by impact once again in 2020. Delivering a seamless digital customer experience also remained the most important business priority, while rationalizing, simplifying and modernizing applications and infrastructure stayed at the top of executives’ IT priorities.

2020 top trends by impact

  1. Fast-shifting consumer product and digital servicing expectations
  2. Managing costs to maintain/improve combined operating ratio
  3. Meeting and optimizing regulatory compliance
  4. Widespread concern of cyber-attack
  5. Growing impact of emerging technologies on the industry

 

Post-pandemic declaration trends show rise in end-to-end automation

For interviews conducted after the pandemic declaration by WHO on March 11, 2020, the customer digital experience lessens in impact as a trend (-11%) while cybersecurity rises in impact (+10%) when compared to earlier interviews.

Results from digital strategies remain low

This year, 95% of executives have a digital strategy in place, compared to 92% last year, and 18% are producing results from digital strategies, compared to 17% in 2019. Forty-four percent have a strategy that extends across the enterprise, while 25% report their enterprise strategy extends to their external ecosystems.

Many executives cite a renewed focus on improving their combined operating ratios

As they focus more on improving combined operating ratios, 91% of executives cite deriving value from data to improve underwriting and customer evaluation as a top business priority.

Interest in substantial managed services rises after pandemic declaration

This year we asked insurance executives to share why they use managed services and how they plan to leverage them. Top reasons include driving significant cost savings while also maintaining control. Responses concerning plans for using managed services vary before and after the pandemic declaration, as in the example shown.

% planning to leverage substantial managed applications in 3 years
28% 2020 post declaration
24% 2020 prior to declaration

Benchmarking clients’ satisfaction with their own IT organization

insurance it satisfaction chart 2020

(Scores from 1 to 10, with 10 most satisfied, showing 3 out of 10 available attributes)

For the third year, business and IT executives interviewed ranked their satisfaction with their own IT organizations based on the 10 key attributes of a world-class IT organization. For most attributes, business leaders report lower satisfaction levels with their internal IT compared to IT leaders. Consistently introducing innovation has the lowest average score at 6.2, but this is up 0.7 pts from 2019.

Learn more about the 2020 CGI Client Global Insights.

Learn more about  CGI in Insurance.

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To consult with one of our industry experts to learn more about client insights and CGI’s perspectives on business and technology trends, contact us.