With skyrocketing inflation and growing severity of weather-related losses, 2022 was a tough year for insurers. We were spot-on with our 2022 predictions—such as the need to improve the customer experience, increased adoption of connected underwriting, and the growing importance of ESG. While many of last year’s trends will continue into 2023, we have identified several emerging trends for this year.

Digital technologies are fundamentally shifting how businesses across all industries operate and serve their customers, and insurance is no exception. Many insurers today offer innovative digital technologies to meet the needs of their consumers. So, whether you are looking for health, life, auto, or home insurance, there are a handful of insurance companies that can help you register easily through an app or website.

The underwriting process is notoriously inefficient. Today, underwriters typically spend 40% of their time on non-core activities such as gathering and entering data for submissions and renewals, issuing policies, and administrative tasks. The result of such manual underwriting is lost productivity and higher costs, with an expected price tag for insurers of $85–$160 billion in lost business over the next five years. In the current economic climate, efficiency is more important than ever.

When a leading office supply chain coined the phrase “That was easy!” in an iconic 10-year-long ad campaign, that simple idea resonated with people everywhere. And that’s no coincidence. None of us wants our daily tasks to be labor-intensive, time-consuming, or complicated. The same is true in the world of insurance. To drive growth, insurers need to make it easy for agents and brokers.

According to a McKinsey report, companies making intensive use of customer analytics are 2.6 times more likely to have a significantly higher ROI than their competitors. Intensive users of customer analytics are 23 times more likely to outperform their competitors in terms of new customer acquisition than non-intensive users, and 9 times more likely to surpass them in customer loyalty.

The metaverse is steering the next wave of digital transformation, which will provide insurers with powerful technology tools for differentiation as well as challenges to navigate. In the years ahead, the rise of the metaverse will begin to influence every facade of insurance, from the workforce experience to distribution, marketing, products, revenue pools, and operations.

One of the biggest preventable losses that hurts insurers worldwide is fraudulent insurance claims. The P&C segment accounts for the most fraudulent insurance claims, with auto insurance and workers’ compensation making up the biggest percentage of fraudulent claims that have an annual impact on the insurance business.

In current times, no industry can survive without adopting relevant technologies, and the insurance industry is no exception. Technology plays a vital role in the insurance industry. Technology is redefining the way traditional insurance business is being done and driving smart reinvention of workflows. Technology is now part of all the stages of the insurance life cycle, right from the policy advice stage to claim settlement.

Insurance companies, like those across many other industries, struggle with systemic issues brought on by disjointed, outdated core technologies. To help minimize the strain disconnected systems can cause, Appian invests in experts with years of first-hand experience to deliver digital solutions that can increase efficiency and improve the customer experience.

Whether a company is small or large, digital transformation is essential. Every lecture, panel discussion, article, and study about how firms can stay competitive and relevant as the world gets more digital makes that point loud and clear. Many corporate leaders are unsure of what the term “digital transformation” actually entails. Is it merely a memorable way of saying “going to the cloud”? What concrete actions do we need to take?