digitization for a better customer experience

The concept fintech has been in common use for quite some time now; it stands for technological innovation applied to the financial sector: a paradigm shift made possible by digital transformation.

What does that translate to? To put it briefly: new business models, new processes, products and services, disintermediation, simplification, new market playersand therefore many new ones possibilities to be seized.

The discourse is similar when we talk about insurtech: a label where we include everything related to digital technological innovation used in the insurance industry.

Fintech and insurtechIt almost goes without saying, is two driving forces that follow the same directionand they continue to reinforce each other.

To get a general idea of ​​the size of the market we are talking about, consider it in the first half of 2022 alone, global investment in fintech was $107.8 billion. In the previous six months (second half of 2021), this figure was $111.2 billion.

Let’s go to the more specific field insurtech. At the end of 2021, the market value was 3.85 billion dollars. And the growth projections? They are impressive: the compound annual growth rate is estimated at around 51.7% for the period up to 2030.

The Italian insurtech market has also started to move at a good pace. In the first half of 2022, investments exceeded €200 million. The year before, in the same period, this figure was around 60 million euros. As we can see, this was a marked increase, but Italy still lags behind compared to other European countries such as Germany and France. Seen from another point of view, we can say that there is a huge room for growth in the Italian fintech and insurtech ecosystem.

The insurance sector was initially held back on its path towards digitization by the slow and bureaucratic procedures that have always characterized it, all the more so in Italy. But now things have changed completely.

The path drawn by this shift has a very clear direction: it departs digital identification and authentication systems to the collection and utilization of data— the most valuable asset for any company today — to creation of a new relationship with customers.

In this post, we will focus on three crucial areas: the issues of digital identity and electronic signature; legally compliant digital preservation; and finally, from CRM systems to CCM that are digital and personalized.

Digital identity and electronic signature

Let’s start with the concept “electronic identification,” as defined on the official website of AGID (Agency for Digital Italy).

“Electronic identification is a process by which personal authentication data is used in electronic form to uniquely identify a natural person and a legal entity.”

In short, it is a set of information that uniquely identifies a specific person, within a given computer system.

Not only that: digital identity makes it possible to establish that an individual, at a certain time, performs certain actions Online.

Without getting lost in excessive technical details, let’s get to the point: through digital identity systems, all boarding procedures in insurance can take place directly online, without analogue steps, and still in compliance with all legal provisions and with maximum security.

The electronic identification system that we are all most familiar with is absolute SPEED. According to data from the Digital Italy Agency, the total number of SPID digital identities in Italy exceeded 35 million from January 2023.

Of these, more than 6 million have been activated in the past year, with the trend accelerating steadily and decisively, triggered especially since the crisis phases of the Covid-19 pandemic. During 2022, there were more than one billion logins with SPID.

Then there is the question of the CIE, the electronic identity card: by the end of 2022, more than 32 million Italians had CIE.

And of course electronic signature the tool fits into this slot. Signing documents and contracts remotely and from all types of devices, precisely through electronic signature solutions, is now what users expect. Integrating these tools into your processes is therefore a key step to improve efficiency, but also to provide a better customer experience.

Very short: public use of these tools is at an all-time high. And insurance companies must keep this in mind and use it to their advantage.

Compatible digital preservation

To address the topic of digital preservation, we need to establish a preliminary awareness: that of the difference between dematerialization and digitization. Dematerialization processes refer to the simple replacement of paper documents with their electronic counterparts. Digitization goes further.

Just through digitization can paper documents and analog processes are completely eliminated, as digital counterparts gain full legal and evidentiary value. There are many benefits of digitization for fintech and insurance companies. First of all, that saves money: these are the direct and indirect costs that come from paper, space to store it in, postage etc. And when it comes to the insurance industry, the amount of paperwork can be (and almost always is) very important. Of course, it also saves a lot of time.

Then there is the efficiency in terms of search time: Unearthing a package among a mountain of papers may not be easy. And consider how complicated it can be to search for just a few specific elements in a single document.

With digitization, these problems cease to exist: you can search efficiently, in a targeted way, with almost immediate results.

With standardized digital storage, moreover, the risk of loss, wear and tear and compilation errors is drastically reduced.

Then consider the aspect of share whole documents or parts of them: in a digital environment, everything is easy and immediate. In analogue, the same process is slow, cumbersome and full of risk.

Eelso let’s not forget the aspect of opennessand above all, the ability to utilize your document storage at different levels which was previously unthinkable. Think of everything that can be triggered through wise analyzes of big data, or – even more – of “smart data” or “deep data” that corporate documents are full of.

But that’s still not all. Digitization produces a range of possibilities that go beyond simple fulfillment: opportunities starting with electronic filing and then impact CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and CCM (Customer Communication Management) processes in a positive way.

We will focus on these possibilities below, in the final part of this post.

From CRM to CCM

The trajectory of this post has centered on the areas of fintech and insurtech matters, particularly the delicate stages of onboarding. We started with digital identification and authentication tools. And we moved on to the topic of digital archiving and regulatory storage.

We get to outline a final step, which is in many ways the most decisive.

The most important fruit of digital archivingactual, is a CRM (Customer manager) system that is extremely efficient, smart and can be used at a great depth level. To put it another way: an invaluable mine of data on all your customers.

What does all this mean? Into one unprecedented amount of knowledge about your target audience.

Knowledge which in turn is a breakthrough in communication and in the relationship between the insurance company and the individual insured. In short, revolutionary CRM systems in the digital sense have an extremely positive impact on CCM (Customer Communication Management) systems as well. And what is the key word for future CCMs? Personalization.

Starting with data analysis, companies can build a one-to-one digital communication with their customers. A real one tailored dialoguebased on individual risk profiles, of course, but also on individuals’ characteristics, needs and wishes. Pay attention to this data! The insurance industry is the third largest manufacturing sector with the highest “planned churn” rate: this has grown from 19.5% in 2018 to 22.5% Today.

In short, everything revolves and increasingly will revolve around the question of Customer retention: it is the first concern and goal of companies in the industry. And the way to reach this goal is through the companies’ ability to create a new relationship with individual policyholders. With the tools offered by specialized companies such as Doxeecan you integrate certification and authentication tools with electronic signature tools, all the way to digital preservation. Finally to customized marketing and communication tools. Not surprisingly, an industry giant AXA has relied on the services offered by Doxee with the aim of reduce the cancellation rate for customers at the sensitive time of policy renewal.