Technology is helping the insurance industry navigate obstacles that have arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the sector generally been slow to adopt new technology, a panel of experts said. 

As companies adopt technologies, each must prove its worth by offering measurable returns on cost, they said.

There were “plenty of challenges” when the pandemic hit earlier this year, said Sean Ringsted, executive vice president, chief digital officer and chief risk officer for Chubb Ltd.

He was speaking during panel session included in the online presentation on Thursday of Business Insurance’s 2020 Innovation Awards.

The obstacles the industry faced, however, “accelerated technical solutions,” such as remote monitoring at construction sites and facilities, because travel was limited and prevented site inspections.

“It’s really been long overdue for the insurance industry,” Mr. Ringsted said. 

Axa XL was prepared to work completely remotely when the outbreak hit, said Justin Gress, director of strategic operations, North America insurance, for the division of Axa SA.

The insurer had only recently migrated to Microsoft’s collaborative tools program Teams before the pandemic restrictions hit, he said. “Good timing on our part.”

Technology turned to a boom for Axa XL when the annual meeting of the Risk & Insurance Management Society Inc. was forced to go remote amid pandemic restrictions. The meeting is a key industry event allowing insurers and brokers to meet directly with multiple policyholders.

“Doing a virtual RIMS this year wasn’t something Axa XL or anybody planned to do,” Mr. Gress said. The company, however, was able to “do many more meetings over time a period of time than what we would have been able to conduct in person. Being able to meet with customers was a very important thing.”

Despite the technological gains, more progress is needed, said Robert Petrie, CEO of Origami Risk LLC in Chicago.

“The insurance industry lags behind other industries in developing industrywide technology standards to share information broadly,” he said.

Data movement is very expensive in the insurance industry and “costs pennies” in others, Mr. Petrie said.

Insurers often don’t export data digitally, he said. For example, some insurers only provide claims data in PDF format. “They have computers but export data as pictures of paper,” Mr. Petrie said.

The sector has also been slow to embrace cloud storage, he said.

“Cloud computing has been here for the last 14 years,” Mr. Petrie said, adding that Amazon Web Services, a major cloud computing platform, was launched in 2006. “But the insurance industry is way behind, again, many other industries in adoption. Core systems for claims, policy, and billing are (on-premises) and mostly old technology.”

An issue with widespread adoption is cost.

“There are costs associated with these different technologies and data initiatives,” Mr. Gress said. “There has to be a return on investment for any of these technologies,” he said, which is one of the challenges.

Brokers will invest more in technology, Stephanie Pronk, senior vice president at Aon PLC

“I do think that from the brokers side that you’ll see a lot more investment in different types of technology,” she said.

The panel was moderated by Jennifer E. Reno, global risk manager at QVC Inc.