Special Ep: Ian Summers AdvantageGo and Jeff Cohen Zywave: Let the client choose what they want

Today’s episode showcases a really important advancement in the
provision of technology to the insurance industry. Back in the
early days of computerisation we installed different systems in
our businesses to do different jobs. We didn’t expect them to
talk to each other. And because each was made of proprietary tech
 – they almost certainly didn’t. Nowadays we want systems to
ingest data sources and the output of other systems and we expect
these new outputs to be easily ingestible further down the chain
by our own suppliers and all the different departments of our
business as well as regulators and other essential third parties.
Common standards and modern connectivity are allowing this to
happen. I suppose this is the difference between computerisation
and digitisation. But this begs a change in the way technology
providers go about their business. Either they will try to be all
things to all people and produce their best attempts at solving
every problem and answering every question that the insurance
industry is trying to answer, or they will have to be more
realistic and pragmatic. In a world brimming with excellent
providers of increasingly specialist solutions, many are
realising that the best outcomes for customers are going to come
about when they are provided with a wide array of choice and ease
of operation. A customer should be able to run different tools on
the same platform without having to become an expert in plugging
them all together themselves. Tech providers should be doing this
for them and making their lives easy. There should also be the
possibility of choosing between different competing options for
certain tasks. This strategy is called an ecosystem approach and
it is what we are going to be getting deep into today. To help us
I spoke to Ian Summers Global Business Leader of AdvantageGo and
Jeff Cohen who is a Senior Vice President at Zywave. Ian and Jeff
are vastly experienced in their fields. Ian is the architect of
the AdvantageGo ecosystem idea and Zywave is a core member of
this affiliation. You absolutely don’t have to be a techie to
find this discussion useful and Ian and Jeff are really
approachable and good at explaining things to laypeople like me.
Half an hour with these two and I guarantee you’ll be excited
about the possibilities that a genuinely digitised insurance
world are going to open up for all of us, not least in a brave
new AI-enabled world. NOTES AND ABBREVIATIONS: We mentioned ISO,
which is the Insurance Services Office. API is Application
Programming Interface. ECF is the Electronic Claims File used in
the London Market. LINKS: Learn more about AdvantageGo’s
ecosystem here: https://www.advantagego.com/ecosystem/ Expect
more additions as time progresses.