If you have never been to the Global Insurance Symposium (GIS), you need to mark your calendar to attend. Last week was my first opportunity to experience this thought-provoking event with hundreds of motivating and inspiring insurance peers. That’s right, insurance can inspire and motivate and here is why:
1: Discovery: The number of “A-ha!” and lightbulb moments were too many to count. I think we could have powered the conference center with all the energy and excitement. For example, this conference took concepts like blockchain and distilled it into real, usable value for the insurance industry. I walked away with not only additional, tangible use cases beyond what my FINEOS team and I have already envisioned, but also for compliance geeks like me, the legal support to give the green light.
2: Possibilities: GIS brilliantly led a student insurance case competition where teams from various colleges across the country competed, attendees listened, and then voted on the finalists’ concepts. These students and their insurance concept ideas were sunglass-donning bright! If ever someone thought the insurance industry was old-fashioned and filled with old-timers, make no mistake: the youth have great plans to reimagine insurance as we know it.
3: Evolution: That brings me to the third reason GIS is a premier event. Insurance is evolving whether we like it or not. The world is changing, people are changing, and so the expectations of how to insure people and their world must change. GIS was a multi-day incubator of both inspirational and tactical ways carriers can update with the times. In more ways than one, attendees identified that one of the biggest risks insurers face today is believing that their products will always be relevant. By including insurance commissioners, insurtech execs, and carrier business leaders on panels, along with students and start-ups with their innovative ideas, GIS brought together the tried-and-true and the art-of-the-possible insurance thinkers to inspire our industry to move into the future.
I’m bringing home the seeds I picked up at GIS to plant them and nurture them into growth at FINEOS so that we can deliver the vanguard of insurtech and regtech innovation for the employee benefits market. Things like:
- how to practically and compliantly deliver and support artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) by leveraging the vast amounts of carrier data, but in an explainable and efficient way;
- ways to support carriers’ delivery, sale, and enrollment of employee benefits to both the group and individual markets in ways such as de-commoditizing the product and coupling it with household subscriptions such as Spotify; and
- delivering wellness benefits in all of their forms, including products like paid caregiver leave, and life insurance and paid medical leave, to support employees’ peace of mind knowing that in the event of a major life event, they are supported with wage-replacement benefits.
One thing is clear, insurance carriers are tackling our brave new world and doing so with technology front and center of their strategic initiatives. FINEOS is proud to support these next market opportunities through our core FINEOS Platform, FINEOS Insight and FINEOS Engage.
