If there's one thing that incumbent insurers and InsurTech startups seem to agree on, it's the fact that these two segments of the same financial-industry pie operate under the auspices of completely different business cultures. Consider that insurers have traditionally been consumed with calculating risk while tech-driven startups thrive on test first, adjust later product and process development. Related: 5 fuels for your insurance innovation engine |

Extreme change ahead

The spirit of tech-driven collaboration on show during InsureTech Connect 2017 — an event that began last year with roughly 1,500 participants and this year grew to include well over twice that many people from InsurTechs and incumbents across the globe — is one illustration that insurance in general is engaged in a monumental shift. Bring that idea down to earth and the fact remains that many insurance companies as wells as independent insurance agencies continue to operate using what are now considered dated business models and technologies. "In many cases, the industry is very far from the sort of straight-through, automated processing that you would imagine in a modern company," Oliver Wyman Partner Matt Leonard told a crowd gathered for an InsureTech Connect 2017 session about the current state of insurance industry disruption. "In many parts of the industry, InsurTech means no-tech or low-tech." Leonard's comments were timely: During the same week as he and fellow Oliver Wyman Partner Prashanth Gangu hosted their "Age of Disruption" presentation, Guy Carpenter, which is part of the Oliver Wyman Group, and Celent released "Insurance Accelerators," a market report that outlines many of the steps incumbent insurers can take to jumpstart innovation and digitization efforts. |

And that's not all...

Besides the tools already mentioned, innovators in insurance should look to digitize processes for which they currently use fax machines, paper policy binders, typewriters and green screens in order to fall in line with contemporary consumer tastes and expectations. "We are essentially creating a new, interconnected cyber-physical system. Something entirely different from what we have seen before," says Oliver Wyman Partner Prashanth Gangu. See also: |

• How insurers can stay relevant in an era of disruption
• P&C insurance, innovation and entrepreneurs intersect at EIS 2017
• 4 innovation gateways for the insurance industry
• InsureTech Connect 2017 revealed startup growth, maturity