SE2 made a few announcements recently, including the opening of its delivery and innovation centers in India and the launch of its Digital Engage platform. These decisions represent the company’s future as a platform-based services partner for life and annuity (L&A) insurance carriers.
Current and potential SE2 clients must consider how the service provider’s execution of its product and services strategy will impact them. HFS sees SE2’s moves as timely—helping it keep ahead of the insurtech wave and potentially fixing the execution gap created by its unprecedented market success.
Looking for digital customer engagement? SE2 is doubling down on this flavor of insurtech
SE2 continues to have a strong and progressive technology vision, shared during its recent Partnership Forum in Philadelphia. With the launch of Digital Engage, the company has brought together its Aurum L&A digital core platform with the front-office-focused Engage offering from Life.io, the insurtech where SE2 made a majority investment. Creating a more integrated approach for how these technologies work together makes natural sense, given that this is now a “front-to-back” technology stack for L&A clients. The goal is improved customer engagement, an outcome that L&A carriers particularly struggle with and that has a broader influence on sales conversion rates, renewal rates, and overall customer satisfaction.
SE2’s Digital Engage approach to customer engagement will see carriers and advisors being able to speed up and simplify the quote-to-issue process, freeing customers from painful and lengthy static application forms and reviews along with new-age customer and agent portals to view policies, pay bills, and update information throughout the policy lifecycle. Using Life.io’s gamification and wellness technology, carriers have the opportunity to design new products that bring them closer to their customers. The fact that it all works together using SE2’s API-driven open-architecture framework is a bonus, as carriers have the opportunity to bring in external data and partners to keep innovating new products and services.
In our discussions, SE2 leadership mentioned that they particularly see the need for Digital Engage among mid-market clients. HFS sees a similar strong need for mid-market L&A carriers to catch up on insurtech innovation. The largest carriers have made a lot of investments already in revamping their customer interaction channels and interfaces to be more modern and intuitive, and they are gradually modernizing their core platforms. With them, the struggle is making these investments in an isolated manner, where an integrated approach like SE2’s is still valuable. But, more noticeably, smaller carriers have not been able to match that level of investment through custom applications. SE2’s offering could be compelling here as a way for the mid-market to access a similar level of modern, customer-friendly, and connected platform.
Gearing up with a global talent pool will do wonders for SE2’s execution story
While it continues to push forward on being an industry visionary, SE2 still has a long way to go on execution. HFS continues to gather customer feedback about how the service provider needs to focus more on consistent service delivery. We have noted before how SE2 needs to continue to invest in talent and building out operational excellence in both implementation services and business processes support. Toward this, the service provider has listened and started to deliver. This year, SE2 announced the opening of its India delivery and innovation centers, with 600 associates across Gurugram and, most recently, Pune. The headcount is estimated to exceed 1,000 by next year, with a $10 million annual investment from SE2 to scale up operations. Considering that these centers will be running services across implementation, conversion, and business operations support, SE2 clients can hope to expect greater levels of support in all their SE2 engagements going into next year.
The Bottom Line: SE2’s combo approach to innovation and execution will yield dividends for a still technology-starved L&A market.
SE2’s innovative L&A technology has led to exponential growth for the company, where its biggest challenge now is keeping up with client demand. As HFS has outlined, integration will be the name of the game in insurance in the future, and the more a service provider like SE2 can support a microservices and API-based approach and facilitate carriers’ swapping in and swapping out functionalities as the market evolves, the more it will find success. It will just need to find ways to balance the scales on execution vs. innovation in a way that is contrary to its competitors that are more operationally mature but struggling to innovate. Keeping ahead of insurtech with offerings such as the Digital Engage platform and putting in investments in foundational servicing capabilities will ensure that SE2 creates a sustainable and innovative front for its clients in the future.
HFS will continue to report on SE2 and its competitors’ journeys in the insurance market with our upcoming service provider evaluation, the HFS Insurance Top 10, to be released in November 2019.
