InsurTech is a buzzword nowadays where a variety of technologies are set to transform the traditional insurance industry. In the last two years, insurers have already transformed themselves digitally to offer convenience, security, choice, and a seamless experience to their customers.

Accenture estimates that insurance companies can increase their annual profitability by 20% with the right investment in the technology.

Internet of Things (IoT), telematics, drones, the blockchain, smart contracts, and artificial intelligence (AI) are providing new ways to measure, control, engage customers, reduce cost, improve efficiency and increase customer experience.

Here are five ways Insurers can stay ahead in the market and successfully fulfill high customer expectations.

1. Lower Insurance rates:

– Fitness apps or wearable devices:

Staying fit has many perks. Some of the fitness apps like Wysa and wearable devices help maintain weight, and food habits and boost energy and mood. And most importantly they can help save a huge amount of expenses related to health insurance costs. Numerous insurance providers have tapped into wearable devices to keep motivating their customers to stay fit and healthy and offer them discounts and benefits based on fitness levels.

– Self Driving car:

Self Driving cars can help in reducing the chances of accidents and lower life insurance rates. Since road deaths are a significant percentage of deaths in the entire world, any slight downward change will ultimately lead to lower deaths and hence life insurance claims.

2. Fraud Prevention:

Insurance fraud costs companies billions of dollars per year across the globe. Insurance companies should establish a technology framework, tap into advanced automation and analytics, and take steps to prevent it.

– Digital Signature:

Digital signature technology is without a doubt lowering fake insurance account activation and hence a fraud. For example, a digital signature can prevent fraud- insurance purchased after the accident can be brought down with digital signatures verifying the actual date.

– Data analytics:

The technology involves data mining tools and quantitive analysis. Data analytics can be applied to detect fraud. Predictive analytics is useful to improve the fraud detection process, helping prevent claims payouts. Analytics on claims and fraud transactions helps enhance risk management.

3. Lower underwriting cost:

–IoT

According to IoT Analytics, the global number of connected IoT devices is likely to grow at 9%, with 12.3 billion active endpoints. By 2025, there will likely be more than 27 billion IoT connections, which will have a significant impact on the availability of real-time information that insurers can use for better pricing/underwriting. Drones are satellites on steroids at least as far as underwriting is concerned. Satellites have dramatically changed how home insurance policies are written due to fire. Everything can be captured via drone footage even the houses that get covered behind the trees. Captured data can be used for underwriting purposes.

4. Billing efficiency:

Billing systems are not only integrated but now can accept varied forms of payments allowing ultimate flexibility to the customer and thereby making the billing systems efficient. The automated systems inform and remind customers of approaching due dates for premiums thereby lowering unintentional defaults.

Digital wallet has become one of the most widely used platforms for payment systems. Insurance companies are leveraging payment gateways like Google Play to sell insurance to users. Last year, SBI General Health Insurance launched Arogya Sanjeevani on Google Pay Spot to offer standard coverage at affordable premiums and improve the penetration of health insurance in the country.

5. Specialized insurance:

Each type of insurance is different from the other and the factors that are suited to one are not suited to the other. This requires the insurance agents to have specialized knowledge and the internet helps. however, Machine learning is vitally important here. It has the capability to learn and analyze billions of patterns and identify suitable underwriting clauses as well as identify specific customized plans for the customers based on the data provided. This can change the customer perception of the insurance company and provide an engaged customer who is likely to stay longer.

Dinghy, is a pay-by-the-second insurance provider that customizes coverage for freelancers and businesses where customers may switch their policies on and off as needed without any upfront premiums, interest, credit checks, or fees.

6. Smart and Faster Claim Processing and Settlement:

–AI-Powered Chatbots:

Claim settlement has been one of the pressing issues in insurance. With intense competition looming in the market, delay in the claim settlement gives a bad experience to the customer who prefers to switch to another brand. Insurance providers worldwide have been investing in AI-powered insurance chatbots to enhance customer experience. Metromile can validate 70% to 80% of claims instantly using AVA, an app based-claims assistant.

7. Data-driven pricing

–Telematics:

Innovation has become one of the top priorities for insurers today due to rapid change in customer demand. The usage-based insurance market is projected to hit over $190 billion by 2026, telematics is allowing carriers to capture user data and create personalized usage-based insurance products.

For example, auto insurance was based on a pay-as-you-drive model where customers use to pay a premium based on the distance covered. But with technological innovation, insurers are working on a pay-how-you-drive model where customers can get discounts based on their driving skills.

Rise in demand for innovative solutions, intelligent experiences, and speedier processes has led to technological disruption in the insurance industry. According to IDC, IT spending in the insurance industry will increase globally at a CAGR of 6.0% by 2024, touching $135 billion. With continuous investment in technology, insurers are working on improving customer experience and operational efficiency to maximize profitability in the long run.

Thanks you Scott W Johnson, owner at WholeVsTermLifeInsurance.com for providing your valuable information on how technologies are helping Insurance industry.

Why Netflix Broke Itself: Was It Success Rewritten Through Platform Engineering?

By : Sampada

Published on Nov 13, 2024

App development Platform Engineering

Let’s take a trip back in time—2008. Netflix was nothing like the media juggernaut it is today. Back then, they were a DVD-rental-by-mail service trying to go digital. But here’s the kicker: they hit a major pitfall. The internet was booming, and people were binge-watching shows like never before, but Netflix’s infrastructure couldn’t handle the load. Their single, massive system—what techies call a “monolith”—was creaking under pressure. Slow load times and buffering wheels plagued the experience, a nightmare for any platform or app development company trying to scale

That’s when Netflix decided to do something wild—they broke their monolith into smaller pieces. It was microservices, the tech equivalent of turning one giant pizza into bite-sized slices. Instead of one colossal system doing everything from streaming to recommendations, each piece of Netflix’s architecture became a specialist—one service handled streaming, another handled recommendations, another managed user data, and so on.

But microservices alone weren’t enough. What if one slice of pizza burns? Would the rest of the meal be ruined? Netflix wasn’t about to let a burnt crust take down the whole operation. That’s when they introduced the Circuit Breaker Pattern—just like a home electrical circuit that prevents a total blackout when one fuse blows. Their famous Hystrix tool allowed services to fail without taking down the entire platform.

Fast-forward to today: Netflix isn’t just serving you movie marathons, it’s a digital powerhouse, an icon in platform engineering; it’s deploying new code thousands of times per day without breaking a sweat. They handle 208 million subscribers streaming over 1 billion hours of content every week. Trends in Platform engineering transformed Netflix into an application dev platform with self-service capabilities, supporting app developers and fostering a culture of continuous deployment.

Did Netflix bring order to chaos?

Netflix didn’t just solve its own problem. They blazed the trail for a movement: platform engineering. Now, every company wants a piece of that action. What Netflix did was essentially build an internal platform that developers could innovate without dealing with infrastructure headaches, a dream scenario for any application developer or app development company seeking seamless workflows.

And it’s not just for the big players like Netflix anymore. Across industries, companies are using platform engineering to create Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)—one-stop shops for mobile application developers to create, test, and deploy apps without waiting on traditional IT. According to Gartner, 80% of organizations will adopt platform engineering by 2025 because it makes everything faster and more efficient, a game-changer for any mobile app developer or development software firm.

All anybody has to do is to make sure the tools are actually connected and working together. To make the most of it. That’s where modern trends like self-service platforms and composable architectures come in. You build, you scale, you innovate.achieving what mobile app dev and web-based development needs And all without breaking a sweat.

Is Mantra Labs Redefining Platform Engineering?

We didn’t just learn from Netflix’s playbook; we’re writing our own chapters in platform engineering. One example of this? Our work with one of India’s leading private-sector general insurance companies.

Their existing DevOps system was like Netflix’s old monolith: complex, clunky, and slowing them down. Multiple teams, diverse workflows, and a lack of standardization were crippling their ability to innovate. Worse yet, they were stuck in a ticket-driven approach, which led to reactive fixes rather than proactive growth. Observability gaps meant they were often solving the wrong problems, without any real insight into what was happening under the hood.

That’s where Mantra Labs stepped in. Mantra Labs brought in the pillars of platform engineering:

Standardization: We unified their workflows, creating a single source of truth for teams across the board.

Customization: Our tailored platform engineering approach addressed the unique demands of their various application development teams.

Traceability: With better observability tools, they could now track their workflows, giving them real-time insights into system health and potential bottlenecks—an essential feature for web and app development and agile software development.

We didn’t just slap a band-aid on the problem; we overhauled their entire infrastructure. By centralizing infrastructure management and removing the ticket-driven chaos, we gave them a self-service platform—where teams could deploy new code without waiting in line. The results? Faster workflows, better adoption of tools, and an infrastructure ready for future growth.

But we didn’t stop there. We solved the critical observability gaps—providing real-time data that helped the insurance giant avoid potential pitfalls before they happened. With our approach, they no longer had to “hope” that things would go right. They could see it happening in real-time which is a major advantage in cross-platform mobile application development and cloud-based web hosting.

The Future of Platform Engineering: What’s Next?

As we look forward, platform engineering will continue to drive innovation, enabling companies to build scalable, resilient systems that adapt to future challenges—whether it’s AI-driven automation or self-healing platforms.

If you’re ready to make the leap into platform engineering, Mantra Labs is here to guide you. Whether you’re aiming for smoother workflows, enhanced observability, or scalable infrastructure, we’ve got the tools and expertise to get you there.

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InsurTech: 5 benefits of technologies in Insurance Sector