With the onslaught of hyperautomation, it’s easy to assume insurance is stodgy and boring. But don’t be fooled. Yes, the industry has its flaws—some of them fatal. But over the next decade, technology will revolutionize insurance more than it has in the past three decades combined.

Every agile software engineering team wants to do these three things: The reality is that as we focus on improving one thing, sometimes it is at the expense of another. If we focus on accelerating feature development, feature quality could suffer. If we focus on improving feature quality, development could slow, potentially delaying the release. But what if we could have it all?

When a company is small, having a fully centralized data team may not be an issue. As you grow, however, problems can start to arise. You have one structure that’s supporting all of your business units, and they may not be able to dedicate sufficient time and resources to individual business units. This can lead to delays in surfacing important insights and decisions made on old or inaccurate data.

Recent headlines have highlighted some of the severe risks of older core banking systems, namely aging user interfaces and a lack of governance. The accounting foundation of an older core remains solid, but the ability to provide good governance, enforce business rules and present a user-friendly interface to the business person is often lacking.

Appian is the leader in enterprise low-code automation. We didn’t get there by being complacent, but rather from continuous, industry-leading innovations. With each release, we reinforce our commitment to helping you build apps and workflows rapidly on our low-code automation platform to help you maximize your resources and improve business results.

Appian 21.1 incorporates many highly-requested features that improve usability and productivity including updated low-code RPA and intelligent document processing (IDP) features.

Insurers, reinsurers and intermediaries are under pressure to adapt to new customer expectations. Insurtechs have made omnichannel digital experiences the norm. And COVID-19 has forced the issue further, on top of necessary operational and claims process changes. Digital transformation is no longer a buzzword or something that can fix just one area of an insurance organization.

How was that credit application declined? Why was that person denied parole? How were disability benefits cut for those constituents? And why do computers learning from humans automatically see certain occupational words as masculine and others as feminine? It’s hard to explain how the most advanced algorithms make decisions. But as predictive systems proliferate, there are signs we’ve become more wary of their use in making critical decisions.

In 2020, low-code application development went mainstream. Organizations everywhere prioritized the ability to rapidly adapt, making the Low-Code Application Platform (LCAP) an essential part of the enterprise technology stack. Low-code may be everywhere—but many IT and development teams are failing to reach its full potential. Ironically, they’re running low-code projects with traditional, high-code development practices.

The insurance industry is among those most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Claims are likely to top €190 billion in 2021, according to reinsurer Lloyd’s of London. However, the pandemic did not fire the starting pistol in challenging insurers to transform, although it has amplified the issue. You can read more about the challenges specific to this sector in a recent interview with Gijsbert Cox, EMEA Insurance Industry Leader at Appian.