Swiss Re

Swiss Re has 160+ years of history, sharing insights and knowledge with clients. Most of our work involves gaining an understanding of the real world implication from large amounts of data. When I started my career 10 years ago, one client in continental Europe sent us a fax, listing all the fire losses in their portfolio over the last year.

Fast forward 10 years and the industry is in the midst of transformational change. Cloud technologies have unlocked incredible opportunities and enabled us to scale our solutions in a more meaningful way for ourselves and our clients.

Swiss Re has implemented cloud in different flavours for most of our internal systems and applications. Going beyond the core, we migrated our existing client solutions from on premise to SaaS and built new ones in partnership with cloud native providers.

Impact+ Life & Health is our newest and most powerful cloud solution. We have created a global factory to ingest first-and third-party data, transform it, use it to build and train models, and provide actionable insights to a great variety of clients and users. Here are two examples to illustrate how revolutionary cloud applications are:

• Leveraging the scalable nature of the computing resources, we can project future cashflows at an individual policy level under different scenarios, as opposed to aggregating on spreadsheets. Imagine 10'000 policies, projected into the next 20 years under 20 different scenarios, gaining granular insights into optimizing portfolio dynamics, policyholder behavior and corresponding actions the portfolio owner can take to improve performance. Building it on the cloud then allows Swiss Re to deploy this to clients and replicate the process for new portfolios on the go. Optimizing cash flows in this way unlocks 100m+ USD of present value for our clients on an annual basis.

 Cloud technologies help insurers connect their distribution, with admin,with servicing and claims. We are really at the start of this journey and have already since incredible value in upgrading the customer experience 

• Another powerful application in development captures value at scale through federated data models. In essence, a common data structure keeps data sets in separate regions/databases, but with models can learn from each one and improve. This is particularly powerful when there are concerns with sharing private data, or cross-border data transfers.

Both of these examples highlight the flexibility that cloud solutions have enabled us to provide, while also giving access to Swiss Re knowhow in an on demand and updatable way. As soon as we refine our models, clients have the latest version not only available, but operationalized.

So what’s next?

Cloud is just the enabler, the start of a more powerful and transformative journey. Areas of opportunity include:

• Regulatory and data protection landscape optimization. Regulatory bodies mainly fear the potential negative impacts, including discrimination. We believe that cloud and data provides more transparency and explainability.

• Redesign of the user experience of insurance. There are some newer players that have brought fresh air into the domain. By and large, the user experience remains unpleasant. Cloud technologies help insurers connect their distribution, with admin, with servicing and claims. We are really at the start of this journey and have already since incredible value in upgrading the customer experience.

• Enhance the employee experience. In the last 10 years, the insurance employees have gone from working off of paper and spreadsheets to working with high tech (and spreadsheets - Turns out that’s ingrained in insurance). Job satisfaction has gone up and the skills needed to thrive in the environment have also invited cross pollination from tech companies.

The cloud is just getting on a roll and is itself just the start of bigger things to come. The insurance industry is aware, investing and should be well positioned to tackle the coming challenges and opportunities.