DevOps integration in modern insurance platforms

Traditionally, the practice of insurance has leveraged changes in technology to better serve its customers, increase efficiency and controls, and recognize the value of technology-led change as a value driver. Overall, these factors have significantly improved the service offering and company profitability with insurance reducing the loss ratios over the past decades. In fact, as a result of these investments, and given the new technologies available insurers and reinsurers operate in a far more competitive environment. That said, the driver of value is changing, as reflected by the heightened interest in the reinsurance and insurance tech sector (Fitó et al., 2010; Bass et al., 2015; Erich et al., 2017).

Over the past couple of decades, the rate of technological change has accelerated dramatically with cloud, machine learning, natural language processing, use of APIs, and software development tools allowing companies to adapt even faster than previously. With this has come a much greater power that is democratized more broadly with new tools allowing small startups with limited capital but massive capabilities to challenge the incumbents. This pace of change is set to increase further with the advent of AI-driven products. Given its potential impact on multiple dimensions of our society, regulatory scrutiny will surely increase increasing costs and complexity. To combat the potential loss of market share or even the risk of disruption, insurers have shown interest in digital transformation, to not only safeguard their position but increase gains, efficiencies, and value creation. Insurers have looked to invest in in-house talent and work with insurtechs to experiment with the new technology to identify new opportunities but also deputizing tasks to digitized processes and technology stacks.

This churn in the economics of these industries is driven by several factors including the importance of data and technology in the identification, and support of risk as well as the use of new technology in pricing as well as the support of risk portfolios (Gruhn & Schäfer, 2015; Wiedemann et al., 2020).