Financials

<p style="text-align: justify;">Diminishing growth, as well as a low rate-low yield environment, are just two of the challenges insurance companies are facing on their investment side in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">These combined pressures have forced investment management firms to better explore how efficiencies can be gained by reducing operating costs. One way for insurers to respond to these challenges and reduce costs in a post covid era is by investing in their digital transformation strategy - with a clear focus on hyperautomation.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Hyperautomation is the application of advanced technologies like RPA (robotic process automation), artificial intelligence, machine learning and process mining that digitally transform operations and automate processes that traditionally have been manually performed by humans.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Also referred to as intelligent automation, disruptive hyperautomation technologies hold the key to increasing productivity, optimising operations and ultimately reducing costs.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Hyperautomation can fundamentally transform and disrupt how Insurance Asset Management companies operate from the bottom up. As well as helping reduce operating costs, digital transformation technologies such as AI and RPA can also help companies to consume and scrub data to better analyse portfolio valuations and insurance risk, and more rapidly respond to industry crises.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">In order to implement RPA and other Hyperautomation technologies into an existing business strategy, Insurance Asset Management organisations can implement the ADKAR&reg; model of change. This practical tool maps out effective change management with five consecutive actions:</p><ol><li style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Awareness:</strong> Organisations looking to implement RPA firstly need to effectively communicate the need and urgency for a digital transformation strategy.</li><li style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Desire:</strong> A desire to undertake transformation and change then needs to be fuelled. Buy-in can be achieved through company and workplace incentives and opportunities &ndash; such as promotions, team building experiences, rewards and establishing effective Centres of Excellence (CoE).</li><li style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Knowledge:</strong> Knowledge of how the strategy will change the company then needs to be clearly defined and positively communicated; existing knowledge also needs to be utilized to address existing skill and knowledge gaps, and to upskill and reskill the human workforce to achieve an augmented workforce (human and digital workforce working together).</li><li style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Ability:</strong> Creating awareness and providing knowledge on upcoming change should then lead to its effective implementation and achieving the desired changes and transformations.</li><li style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Reinforcement:</strong> Transformation isn&rsquo;t ever fully complete, or a set point to reach; rather it is organic and perpetually evolving. Reinforcing these developing transformations on an ongoing basis is still the most essential component in change management however. The CoE should ensure that the latest transformation message echoes through the overall strategy until so that these practices become fully integrated.</li></ol><p>Business leaders in the insurance asset management sector may currently be reluctant to initiate a digital transformation programme, given lingering economic uncertainty. Yet despite the circumstances, digital transformation is a vital investment in any insurance company&rsquo;s long-term health, and the more quickly implemented, the more quickly costs can be reduced and efficiency greatly improved.&nbsp;</p>