2019 CGI Client Global Insights for Insurance

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, budgets and investment plans. In 2019, we conducted in-person interviews with 119 client executives in the insurance sector who cite digital servicing expectations, regulatory compliance, cost management, cybersecurity and emerging technologies as dominant drivers this year.

Fast-shifting consumer expectations is the most impactful trend

2019 top trends by impact
Year-on-year trend comparison

Insurance executives cite consumers’ fast-shifting expectations for products and digital services as the highest impact trend year-over-year. Managing costs to maintain and improve combined operating ratio remains the second most impactful trend, followed by ensuring and optimizing regulatory compliance.

Fast-shifting consumer product and digital service expectations remains top trend

The growing impact of emerging technologies (such as the Internet of Things, blockchain and dynamic pricing) rises to fourth, while extending the industry value chain decreases in impact to fifth.

In 2018, the top trend was fast-shifting consumer product and digital servicing expectations followed by the need to manage costs to maintain and improve combined operating ratio. Regulatory compliance was third, extension of the industry value chain was fourth, and the growing impact of emerging technologies was fifth.

2018 year-on-year comparison - Protecting through cybersecurity was the top industry trend for 2018

Key findings

39% have a defined enterprise digital strategy

Insurance digital transformation 2019 — *Includes enterprise strategy and enterprise strategy extending to external ecosystem

This year, 92% of insurance executives indicate that their organization has a defined strategy in place. Of those, 25% are in the building stage, 33% are launching, 21% are operational, and 17% are producing results.

Explore how organizations are gaining value from their enterprise digital transformation strategy.

Demand for speed versus legacy constraints cited as top challenge

The top digital transformation challenges for insurance executives are mostly consistent year-over-year, except the demand for speed versus legacy system constraints is now the top challenge. It displaces by a small margin cultural change and change management, which fell by 8 percentage points to become the second top challenge.

70% are using the cloud

Insurance cloud usage 2019 — Percentages represent "yes" answers. Executives can select multiple cloud usage types. "No" and "other" answers are not shown.

This year we asked insurance executives to share how they are using cloud-based solutions, and 35% report they are using them for their own organization, 2% for customers, and 33% for both, representing a total of 70%. Additionally, they indicated how their organization’s cloud usage is divided between private, public and hybrid clouds (as shown in the above chart). In addition, 27% of executives do not have clarity on whether their enterprise has a mechanism in place to locate where critical data assets are processed and stored.

Benchmarking clients’ satisfaction with their own IT organization

For the second 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. Compared to other industries, oil and gas executives have some of the highest satisfaction scores for IT service delivery among executives we interviewed.

CGI can provide clients with a discussion of all available benchmarking, including each client’s positioning, on topics such as digital maturity, IT spending, IT satisfaction, innovation investments and more. Contact us to learn more.

Learn how CGI helps clients on their journey to world-class IT.