Pick your battles: New software or better architecture?
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Mads Gustafsen is no stranger to insurance and hasn't been for many years. With his work ethic summed up by one of his favorite phrases, "prototype the future", Mads used this thinking to become Executive Partner and Head of Business at Denmark-based global strategy-design firm Manyone. But through all this, his passion remains in helping insurers with the expertise he's built up after several years within the industry, as he continues to advise clients on how to use technology to create unique user experiences. In this interview, he explains the changes affecting the insurance industry and why companies need software and digital experience platforms (DXPs) to handle a new customer journey.
0:00 - Intro
0:18 - Defining 20 Years of digital solutions experience
1:06 - Evolving trends in insurance
1:55 - Challenges to be overcome
3:46 - Tech stack for a digital experience
4:57 - Where does a DXP sit?
5:57 - What is composability?
6:57 - The DXP selection process
8:57 - Prototyping the future
View transcript
So, thinking about not what software you're selecting, but more what kind of architecture you're selecting, has always been, for me, the most important thing. So, you can always find a new piece of software, but to change your architecture and your approach to how you create those experiences is super difficult. My name is Mads Gustafsen and I'm a partner here at Manyone, a global design agency or a strategy design hybrid as we call it. We work a lot with strategies within digital and also the design execution of those strategies afterwards. For the last 20 years I've been involved in several large scale website projects or digital projects with a lot of different technologies in play, designing solutions and platforms and implementing and delivering them to clients across industries, especially finance and insurance and health insurance. So advising clients on how to use technology and create great, great, great user experiences and customer experiences because that's key for what I've always worked with. And if you think of those customers that you've consulted in insurance, what would you say, what challenges and trends have you seen in the last couple of years? What you see is that the brand starts to be the interface where the digital channels is like... that's how you engage with your insurance company. And that also means that insurance companies have had to change the way that they sell, they give quotes, the way they handle claims, because it's digital suddenly, the way they design the products, because suddenly you can perhaps track the way you drive or you can put out an Apple watch that measures how you live your life and so on. So, everything in the insurance business is being dramatically changed over the last 10 years. You mentioned those touchpoints that have changed, I believe, you said how insurers sell, how they quote and also how they process claims. If you think of those areas, what would you say are the technological challenges that insurers have to overcome? Maybe 10 years ago, the way that you would design an insurance product would be by segmenting into age groups or by demographics, and say this is a man, he's between 30 and 40 years old, he lives in here and then you could quote him, give him a price on his car because then you would know what, what risk group he's in today. Today creating a product has 100 variables, it's how you, you know, there are so many data points that can be part of creating the right risk profile for a client, so the way that you, when you get a price, it's automatically individualized and personalized based on who you are and not what cohort or what segment you're part of. For example, an insurance, nobody would have the same product or the same price because it depends on who you are, how you live, how you drive if it's a car insurance, what house you have, what kids you have, what... you know everything goes into the mix of creating the right price for you. It's not just: "Here's your insurance product, it will cost you this amount of money." But you need to give a lot of data to the insurance company to get an actual quote back because then you can get a precise quote. And then you know if you want to buy something and make it easy for the client to buy something, there is a lot of steps and getting the right data. So, creating a great experience where you need to fill out all these forms and to get a price can be sometimes a little bit tricky. Traditionally customers would go and see an agent and get an insurance. Now with digital that has changed. And I assume that a lot of customers are now also using digital touchpoints to get their insurance. What kind of tech stack do you recommend to an insurance to make this digital experience possible? We need software and digital platforms that can handle, you could say, broken journey where you start in a digital channel, that could be your cell phone on the way you're sitting in a queue on the way to work and your traffic is stuck and so on and so you're getting a quote on the phone and then you come to the work and then you continue that on your work laptop or desktop computer, and then in the evening, you look at the quote that has been sent to you on your iPad and the next day you call the agent to buy it. So, we need a platform that can handle a journey across media, across time, across channels where you can pick up the dialog and then start all over again and again. So you are remembered, no matter what channel you are engaging with. That's super important. Thinking of the DXP and insurers: How does a DXP sit within the tech stack of an insurer? Most insurance companies have a lot of legacy IT, so a DXP is like the new animal in the stack that can integrate both to old services in many ways but also all the external and new ways of creating those experiences and tie that together. So, in a modern digital architecture it's one of the key elements to orchestrate that user experience as I spoke about before across channels. So, handling the integration of both, data but also applications of other software components in the stack, being that system that orchestrates all of that in a beautiful way, so that the customer will experience a beautiful experience across those channels. That's key. There's this concept of composability around. Is composability a mindset or is it a technical necessity? How do you see composability? For me it's more about flexibility. Composability for me is more about having a flexible solution where you can change components if it's not working, so you are not locking yourself into a monolith of a platform where it's impossible to change. So, new products arrive every day; "Oh we have this new interesting product where we need to create a service that is inside the metaverse somewhere or a visual platform or whatever it is." So, composability for me is flexibility so you can act quickly and you can ideate and validate and execute on some of the new products and services that you need to create because the markets are changing constantly. How does the selection process of a DXP look like and how do you guide or support your customers in that process? There's always been in the software selection process this divide between choosing one platform for everything or going more like best of breed. So, selecting small software components and stitching together your architecture based on what is best for the job. And I would definitely recommend the last one. So I've talked a lot about DXP but it doesn't stand alone here. It has to work together with several other software components. It could be, tracking software, it could be several things in an architecture that can help create an even better experience. So, having that open architecture where all components are replaceable, so you can switch a strategy quickly, and not build everything on a monolith of a platform, where you buy one and then you need to buy all the other products as well. That's always been my philosophy on creating great software platforms and great software tech stacks; having that flexibility, as I mentioned before, where everything can be changed, so you don't lock into vendors or you don't lock into a programming language or an architecture, but you have freedom to change quickly as the market changes. So thinking about not what software you're selecting, but more what kind of architecture you're selecting has always been for me the most important thing. So you can always find a new piece of software, but to change your architecture and your approach to how you create those experiences is super difficult. Yeah, I think you mentioned, if I summarize three things, the first one I think came through in a couple of your answers, which was mindset, with that comes also experimentation and the willingness to take risks and test your ideas. But that needs to be backed by a flexible architecture that allows you to bring your ideas to life. Prototype the future! Yeah, prototype the future and have a mindset and a toolbox that allows you to do that, because you can never sit in a meeting room and then design the future without experimenting and getting stuff out there in the market and getting the learnings from that. So, experimentation or prototyping... So I guess your sum-up was quite precise. Great. Well, thank you very much.