Opportunities in Crisis

Businesses are responding to COVID-19 by pivoting to new ways of operating, calibrating their technology capabilities and course correcting the "attitude". Attitude is a term used in aviation which refers to the orientation of an aircraft relative to the direction of travel. There are countless war stories on social media and otherwise of employees, students, customers, teachers, service providers and people in essential services re-arranging their ways of life to meet the new challenges. Each story is testimony to a rapid transformation in such a short time with exceptional change management.

Can one then imagine a Banking or Insurance business that has designed an "auto pilot" that can take on key functions like Finance, Actuarial, Risk and Operations? This creates an ecosystem where employees can be trained to take on supervisory roles that can be performed virtually.

We take flying for granted these days (or maybe not in the COVID-19 phase). In days gone by, prior to the introduction of glass cockpits, airplanes had pilots, many flight engineers and support crew to monitor the instruments and non-digitized functions of the airplane in order to stay on course. The "autopilot" digitized the flight deck and created learned capabilities to monitor and perform course corrections, releasing the pilots to supervise the flight. This resulted in further industrialization of the flying experience creating more markets and customers.

"Autopilot" in an Insurance business

In the words of a client executive in Finance, "we invest and hire some of the best actuaries and financial analysts out of college and they spend the foundation years of their careers comparing numbers and maintaining spreadsheets of critical financial data and reporting. We want to provide an environment where the employees are empowered to apply their expertise out of college to expand their value to the business beyond the status quo"

Going back to the aviation example - while the auto pilot can fly by itself, the industrialization and expansion in business value is created by the flight crew supervising the autopilot in ensuring a safe, comfortable, repeatable and profitable flying experience.

COVID-19 has created the opportunity for digitization that will enable workforces to leverage artificial intelligence enabled by cloud ecosystems to perform business transactions remotely and create better outcomes prompted and aided by the digital infrastructure.

This then creates opportunities that free up the human enterprise to create significant value in their current roles aided by the "autopilot" of the firm.

At Aggrego, we are helping Banking and Insurance clients build the "autopilots" of the future.