Hitachi Digital Services and Innovation: What's New?

In a recent interview with Insurtech magazine, Stewart Reeder, Head of the Insurance Vertical at Hitachi, described some of the initiatives being taken to transform the insurance industry.

"With over 80% of their clients reporting increased operational efficiency through bespoke digital solutions, and strategic InsurTech partnerships driving innovation, Hitachi Insurance is setting a new standard in the sector," says Reeder.

Tell us about Hitachi Insurance and its core aims?

"Hitachi Digital Services is helping insurance companies, MGAs, and reinsurers across all lines of business accelerate their journeys to become digitally native insurers.

"Our core aim is to augment or replace legacy technology and improve access and understanding of data to understand risk and customer needs better, whilst improving customer outcomes," he continues.

How does Hitachi Insurance distinguish itself from its competitors?

"We distinguish ourselves from our competitors through our unique combination of industry expertise, innovative technology solutions, and a customer-centric approach that is focused on delivering tangible value. While many systems integrators offer one-size-fits-all solutions, we understand that every insurance company has its own specific needs and challenges," he said, highlighting the team's ability to collaborate closely with clients and develop customised integration solutions that are precisely aligned with their operational and strategic objectives.

What are the current InsurTech trends you are planning around as a business?

"There are two types of InsurTech companies: those that look to compete with traditional insurers such as Lemonade, and those that have created technology that solves specific problems within the insurance value chain without competing against insurers." He continues, "Hitachi Digital Services works primarily with the latter as part of our “InsurTech as a Service” offering."

Insurers have struggled to deploy InsurTech at scale within their businesses for numerous reasons, including entrusting such an important part of the value chain to smaller companies and managing the implications of implementing these technologies upstream and downstream within their business.

"Our offering enables us to bring together Hitachi intellectual property (IP) with that of our InsurTech partners to solve larger problems at pace for our insurance customers. This ensures that insurers can leverage the very best of InsurTech while reducing risk and addressing impacts within the value chain," he continues.

What is the most exciting piece of InsurTech technology that Hitachi uses?

"There are many fantastic InsurTech companies we have partnered with, such as Genasys, a cloud-native Policy Administration Platform challenging perceptions that bigger is better with unparalleled configurability and speed to market. For me, companies like Over-C and Xtract360 are very exciting and give us the opportunity to transform insurance. These are two InsurTechs embedded into our ‘Connected Insurance’ portfolio," he says.

"With Over-C combined with Hitachi Digital Services capabilities in IoT and Video Analytics, we can make all workplaces safer and enable insurers to encourage their customers to actively monitor and manage workplace risk, resulting in improved productivity, reduced claims, better risk pricing, and simplified claim verification."

By combining Hitachi Digital Services' capabilities around data and systems integration with Xtract360's ability to visualise motor accident data, there is tremendous potential to significantly reduce claims costs and speed up claims processing.

How does it affect the outcomes for your business?

"This affects our business outcomes by demonstrating that the innovation and relevance we are renowned for across many industries is equally beneficial for insurance. Hitachi Digital Services solidifies our position as a partner of choice where Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) converge to deliver transformation," he says.

Were there any challenges or risks associated with bringing in the new InsurTech and how did Hitachi mitigate against them?

"With all new technologies, there are challenges and risks, and embedding and partnering with InsurTechs is no exception. These challenges vary by InsurTech—size, maturity of processes and procedures, technology stack maturity, and funding stage. Our financial innovation unit tracks InsurTechs and helps identify the best providers. We have a structured due diligence process for partnering with them, including code reviews, performance testing, and financial reviews. These steps help us mitigate risks and ensure we partner with companies and products that we can confidently bring to our insurance customers."

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