With nearly three decades of experience directing commercial lending, corporate finance, and insurance for leading brands, Perficient’s Insurance Principal, Brian Bell, stands at the forefront of our financial services practice. In the increasingly competitive insurance landscape, organizations must strategically leverage digital transformation, and Brian excels at navigating this evolution to deliver maximum client value across all industries.
Brian believes insurance serves a noble purpose and is a great source of pride. Continue reading to learn more about his ever-evolving approach to insurance, the favorable circumstances for digital transformation in the industry, and the growing momentum our insurance experts are seeing in the marketplace.
What is your role? Describe a typical day in the life.
Perficient, though not new to insurance, is consistently realigning to capitalize on the industry’s digital transformation potential. In my role as our Insurance Principal within our Financial Services business unit, I spearhead our strategy and delivery efforts in insurance. I often engage with account developers and clients to address their requirements in transitioning legacy processes and technology to meet the expectations of a digital operating environment.
Beyond this, my days typically revolve around three major aspects:
- Strategy. It’s important to think about what’s happening in the industry, and to help our clients and teams understand what’s now, new and next. This approach helps leaders to pragmatically prioritize and optimize focus.
- Delivery. Successfully executing delivery excellence in a timely manner while proactively addressing roadblocks is a necessity to growing our expertise.
- Sales support. I see myself as a resource for sellers throughout Perficient by offering thought leadership and strategy that elevate conversations with our insurance clients and prospects.
How would you say your role supports Perficient and our clients?
We’re developing industry solutions needed by many of the largest insurance companies in the market. Carriers choose us to solve complex business challenges through capabilities like personalization, commerce, and platform modernization, and we’re constantly evolving our end-to-end capabilities so we can equip insurers to work smarter, drive value, and stand out in a competitive environment. Our brand point of view is resonating in the marketplace, and we’re being invited to take part in many new opportunities and develop strategic relationships – all helping to grow our Insurance expertise.
How have you seen priorities shift as the insurance market becomes more competitive and new risks emerge for insurers?
Property and casualty insurance is feeling the pinch of increased loss costs due, in great part, to the growing frequency and severity of natural disasters, and heightened automotive accident rates and repair costs. In response, many companies are tightening the market by closely examining expense ratios.
However, this challenging landscape presents an opportunity to leverage digital transformation tools like cloud-based modernization for efficiency, personalization to enhance customer relationships, or intelligent automation to streamline experiences. These strategic investments, paired with data-driven insights, are essential in offsetting some of these loss ratios. Now is the time for businesses to address market shifts by enhancing their infrastructure with a focus on digital transformation, personalization, and predictive modeling.
LEARN MORE: How Perficient Empowers Insurers in the Digital Era
How have you seen key themes from the 2022 InsureTech Connect (ITC) Conference come into play at Perficient throughout the past year?
Many of my conversations and learnings from this year’s ITC event involve agent systems and ecosystems, embedded insurance, and – of course, the hot, new topic for 2023 – generative AI.
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Personalized Experiences Across the Ecosystem
We are looking at a lot of different technologies and platforms to help enable personalization. We’ve had some of the most well-known insurance companies make investments to personalize journeys for agents, direct consumers, and plan participants.
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Embedded Insurance: Not a Fleeting Opportunity
Embedded insurance, one of the main focuses of last year’s conference, has been a bit slower to catch on than the industry anticipated. After conversations with industry leaders at ITC 2023, we believe that, while embedded insurance is still in its infancy, it’s still something to watch.
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Artificial Intelligence (AI)
I believe there’s a time and a place for AI, and we have the opportunity to use it as an aid to our jobs. It can also support employees with the proper content and insights so they can work smarter and more efficiently, freeing time to tackle more important business needs. A great AI use case is a chatbot that can help deflect unnecessary human interaction.
This is a huge value of AI, however, insurance is still highly consultative, and access to a trusted agent or advisor who can personalize and customize an insurance profile as risks and life evolve is still valued and necessary. These agents or advisors can leverage AI to monitor life changes and prompt customer outreach, delivering a better personalized, customer-centric experience.
LEARN MORE: Brian Bell’s Takeaways From ITC 2023
What did you learn in your conversation with an independent research firm during ITC Vegas 2023?
Our ongoing engagements and relationship with this independent research firm have prompted relevant report inclusions, and I was excited to meet with a key industry analyst while at ITC. In this meeting, we discussed digital transformation in the insurance space, specifically as it pertains to true sustainable development. Beyond this, we also talked about the major trends this independent research firm is tracking, and how those mirror what we’ve seen and heard throughout the past year. Some of the main talking points were around agent systems and ecosystems, embedded insurance, and of course, generative AI.
We’re approaching conversations with analysts through the lens of our Now, New, Next (N3) framework, and exploring how and where insurers should prioritize modernization efforts for greater business impact. This approach equips insurers to better differentiate themselves and stay ahead of the pack.
Why are you Proudly Perficient?
I’m proud to be a part of Perficient because of the great people I get to work with. People show up collectively to win and want to win together by working as a team. It starts at the beginning in creating the playbook and is prevalent throughout delivery and beyond. Working with such a diverse group of individuals and mindsets allows me to learn and grow every day, and this is something I see reflected across industries and subject matter knowledge in each project we deliver.
Perficient + Insurance
We believe insurance serves a noble purpose – to protect property, liability and financial obligations. We leverage our technical expertise, delivery excellence and deep understanding of insurance to help our clients transform digitally. Explore why leading insurance carriers count on us to drive results.
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