Majesco Digital1st Insurance® Expands Opportunities as it Expands Capabilities

Sometimes genius is found in the simplicity of a tool. Consider the hammer. Hammers seem to have one task — to pound. But when you actually look at the hundreds of types of hammers, you can see that even the hammer is a tool that has undergone constant evolution and development to suit the needs of particular vocations.

The point is that you don’t always know what the next use is for a tool until you begin using it. This is very much the way that Majesco Digital1^st Insurance^® is coming to be known as a most vital tool in an insurer’s toolbox. Digital1^st Insurance™ is so full of possibilities that they haven’t all been uncovered yet. Majesco has, however, through 18 months of use, found that Digital1^st Insurance™ is highly-flexible and it provides the backdrop for innovative product development and numerous multi-task and multi-use possibilities.

As Majesco and its clients begin uncovering the possibilities, Majesco has been taking these findings and creating enhancements that will make it even more usable across varied insurance applications. This week, Majesco announced a full set of expanded capabilities for Digital1^st   Insurance™ that will accelerate insurers’ digital transformation. You can read the Majesco press release here.

In today’s blog, we’re going to look at these enhancements through the lens of holistic solution sets. Instead of discussing the individual enhancements one-by-one (there are too many), we’re going to look through the lens of three potential use cases that many insurers will find to be very relevant to their own circumstances and then hit the highlights of Majesco’s plan for “Relentless Innovation.”

To assist, two of Majesco Digital1^st’s architects give their take on how and why Majesco Digital1^st Insurance^® is growing so popular among digitally-focused insurers.

What kinds of issues was Digital1^st meant to solve?

“When we launched Digital1^st Insurance™ in May 2018, Majesco started with the premise that insurers needed to simultaneously solve several large issues on the path to becoming digital insurers,” said Manish Shah, President and Chief Product Officer for Majesco. “They needed to quickly offer digital service to clients. They needed to find a way to mature their digital expertise. They needed an easier way to integrate third-party processes and data into their systems. So, we created Digital1^st Insurance™ as a solution set to solve these and other pressing issues.”

Like many other instances of solutions in action, Majesco and its clients really began to comprehend its value once it was in use. With that in mind, Majesco has now identified three use cases, where Digital1^st Insurance™ can have a dramatic impact.

1. Digital Experience Platform Case

The customer experience is the primary driver of most insurers who decide to dive into digital transformation. Insurers need this first and most crucial layer of digital service, so they are choosing a digital experience platform to provide a seamless, intuitive and straight-through process to give their customers a better, omni-channel experience.

“We’re discovering,” said Manish, “that this starting point is giving insurers stronger leadership into digital experiences and all they entail. The Digital1^st Platform, without any boundaries or limitations, provides flexibility, ease and speed to create new consumer experiences that may span beyond typical insurance transactions. Consumers have elevated expectations from their insurers to advise, mitigate and protect them which may require interactions beyond policy, billing and claims transactions. This paradigm shift necessitates the need for a “platform” that has comprehensive out-of-the-box insurance capabilities as well as a wide variety of configuration capabilities to create broad-ranging customer journeys such as digital customer inquiries, easier customer onboarding, risk mitigation alerts, life event-based advisory and more. Majesco Digital1^st Insurance^® tailors itself to fit the unique vision that each insurer is going to have to bring their digital strategies into reality.”

2. A Forward Integration Case — Leveraging the Digital1^st Platform™ as a Portal

While a digital experience platform may be their vision, insurers will find that Digital1^st can, as a first step, meet their immediate functional needs for a portal that is prebuilt with insurance-specific content. This is an important step and it shouldn’t be overlooked as an option.

Portals, like hammers, come in various shapes and forms. A typical bespoke portal has many limitations in the era of ever-changing consumer expectations. Such traditional built-for-purpose portals fail to adapt to changing consumer needs due to time and cost of changes, fail to leverage new technology due to lack of abstraction between core technology and business functionality, fail to provide seamless experience due to integration challenges with the core systems as well as fail to leverage third-party capabilities to enrich the experience. Portals built on Digital1^st Platforms are free of all these limitations and provide a test and learn capability to build and adopt dynamic portals that can quickly adapt to changing customer behavior. We’ll discuss this more in a moment, but for now, we can acknowledge its viability and ease of use for executives who recognize that their first step into digital really needs to be an expert-built, insurance-specific digital portal.

3. Solution Enrichment — Case 1 + Case 2 + Third-Party Capabilities

Every month, the insurance industry seems to be ascending to a new apex of third-party advancement and data enrichment. The only limits to utilizing third-party data and capabilities are an organization’s ability to find the best partners and the implementation time to bring those partners into the system. Ecosystems, however, such as Majesco Digital1^st EcoExchange^®, are rewriting the story of data and capability plug and play. Majesco has reduced the steps involved to one Plugin. But that’s not all that Digital1st connectivity offers for insurers that need solution enrichment. Majesco has created a two-way highway for APIs, allowing insurers to create and publish new APIs in very little time.

“The result is seamless and easy operations,” said Manish, “such as pre-filling of data, improved data quality, reduced keystrokes, integrated analytics capabilities — all through the ingesting of third-party services available in EcoExchange. Through these enhancements and hundreds of others, we are seeing a tremendous amount of excitement in the marketplace.”

Majesco added six clients in the last 18 months and three are already in production. From a business standpoint, new clients are proving the value of Digital1^st  — that insurers will benefit from a multi-tenant platform built with cloud-native technologies that provides elasticity, scalability and portability.

“I can’t imagine a better test and learn type of situation for insurers to be able to launch new business models,” Manish added.

Digital1^st expanded capabilities provide “Relentless Innovation”

Majesco started enhancing Digital1^st Insurance™ the moment that it was launched, and it hasn’t stopped. “Relentless innovation” calls for a two-pronged approach: Evolving existing capabilities to optimize current needs and adding new capabilities to meet future needs. Relentless innovation impacts seven key areas of function that are crucial to insurers:

• User experience
• Reusability
• User analytics
• EcoExchange Apps
• Digital experiences for Majesco Core products
• New capabilities
• Security & compliance

Within these areas, Majesco has paid special attention to customer journeys, using Open APIs, and user experience enhancements.

Customer journeys made easier with Open APIs and no-code development

“Over this year, we have built out the capabilities of being able to connect to third-parties right from within Digital1^st Insurance™,” said Sachin Dhamane, Vice-President, Digital1^st. “We could see the results quickly in terms of how fast companies could bring on new enhancements.”

Any of the customer journeys that are developed in Majesco Digital1st Insurance^® can also be exposed as an OAS3.0 API. Also, the process for bringing in an external API that can be used in a Digital1st user journey is now remarkably simple.

“With Digital1^st, we have added out-of-the-box support for Open APIs. The way it works is simple. If you have the Open API specification, just import that specification and provide the location where you want to connect to. With a URL and a password, you can simply add it in a no-code manner. Drag and drop. Add requirements. You’re done.”

All Majesco P&C Core APIs are also available within the API catalog. These are also available out-of-the-box. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Microsoft are available without the need for configuration. If someone, for example, wishes to monitor a Twitter handle, that API is available from within Digital1^st and they can create that customer journey.

“You can also create Open APIs right within Digital1^st, and expose them securely for third parties to consume,” said Sachin. “At the last InsurTech conference, we demonstrated how easy it is to create an App that can be consumed by Alexa. We then called Digital1^st from Alexa to modify an insurance policy to build a multi-channel digital experience. These are digital-age connections where Majesco has removed digital-age complexity.”

Core integrations made simple with Majesco’s Smart Connector

A number of Majesco Digital1^st® customers also have Majesco Policy as their core system. But because services on any core system can be small and granular, it can take time to stitch together the integrations and connection points. Digital1^st connector to Majesco Policy makes the whole process simpler.

Now business users can make their own integration connections using just one screen that shows (on the left side) Digital1^st objects and model structure and (on the right side) core system connection points. It’s an intuitive mapping tool that can have insurers connected, live, and ready in a very short period of time. The tool handles all validations. It also optimizes the number of calls between Majesco Digital1^st® and Majesco Policy for P&C to provide a real-time automatic integration and frees the business to focus on customer experience. The process itself is now 6x-8x more productive and efficient!

Engagement UX and platform UX experience enhancements

Usability is always at the forefront of Majesco development, with special attention paid to compliance AND any enhancement that will save steps or provide new insights.

Accessibility-related claims have been spiking since 2015. The trend (2016 – 260, 2017 – 814, 2018 – 2,258) is alarming. This data roughly represents 5% of total legal threats (~40,000 demand letters) faced by companies. As insurance companies catch up with Finance and Retail in digitizing, they need to ensure they are compliant with accessibility regulations. All out-of-the-box Digital1^st components are now WCAG 2.1 compliant. We have added dozens of usability components and enhancements that can help insurers to build a brand-new experience that is reusable, without writing any code.

“Our latest addition is the support for usage analytics,” said Sachin. “Insurers want to know how many people visited a site, how many asked for a quote, the number that completed an application, etc. They want to know, ‘Is the new quoting process working?’, ‘Do we need to change our probability numbers to understand the user persona?’ In Majesco Digital1st we have added out of the box support to capture these kinds of analytics and usage tracking and we’ve added support for Google Analytics and MixPanel support is coming soon. Using rapid no-code/low-code capabilities in Digital1^st, now insurers have the ability to quickly adapt the customer experience based on the app analytics.”

Plus, Majesco Digital1^st Insurance^® has added dozens of widgets, 29 new Digital1^st EcoExchange^TM apps covering both platform apps and engagement apps, and over 100 new user features. In December, Majesco launched Electronic Payments within the engagement apps. We will discuss these apps and features in more detail in an upcoming blog.

For insurers who have been looking for ready-to-launch steps toward digital engagement, Majesco Digital1^st Insurance^® may be their best first step. To find out about the latest enhancements, be sure to read our press release or contact Majesco for more information.