During the round table of TNT Symposium on last November 29th, Sasha Baillie, CEO of Luxinnovation, Jerry Grbic, CEO of ABBL, Vincent Arnal, CIO of LALUX, and Olivier Beaujean, CIO of Cargolux tackled the issue of the radically human future. They developed their speeches around 4 key dimensions to answer the matter.

The third one, which was focused on experiences, has been addressed by Vincent Arnal. He shared his insight on how digital and technology innovation can be embraced to better serve customers and employees.

The expert introduced his speech with his opinion on the "digital" term: "it started to be used as a buzz word 8 years ago, and I didn't like it because it meant something like ‘a sum of new emerging technologies (big data, AI and many others) that we had to implement not to be disrupted like Kodaq’. For me, this definition masked the real question of the evolution of consumption patterns due to these technologies and the impact on our economic models."

The innovation approach

Vincent Arnal went on with his speech sharing his view around three axis. The first one concerns the innovation approach. About it, he said: "In IT, the one that seems most natural to us is to define the target and then to decline the transformation roadmap from current state to the target. This approach is not easy in the case of digital transformation, because we have to imagine the future behavior of customers to define a new business model. In the context of the insurance, I can imagine that the way of subscribing insurance contract will evolve to a disintermediated mode. Today, when we buy a plane ticket, we just have to tick a box to subscribe a cancellation or luggage coverage. This mode will evolve towards insurance in your car leasing, or in the protection of your home, rented on Airbnb."

"In terms of IT, declining this target requires to completely rethink your IT. I’m not only talking about APIs and micro-services, but also back offices, because today, our products are designed to be packaged for a one-year period.", he added.

The level of maturity of technologies

The CIO of Lalux carried on with the second dimension he wanted to explore: 

"For many emerging technologies, it is very difficult to imagine their real potential and therefore their future use or definitive place in the application landscape. In insurance, for example, with AI we see several relevant use cases such as fraud detection or product recommendation, but these are only a few specific implementations in our processes."

Vincent Arnal shared the example of the Internet of Things (IoT) to illustrate his words: "the IoT seems quite mature, and several use cases can be identified, such as products for young people and insurers could consider products priced on the driving behavior. But what if people stop driving because vehicles are autonomous? Will people still buy vehicles? Who will insure these vehicles: the leasers, or the manufacturers?"

The expectations of the customer

This thought led the expert to his last issue: what is expected by customers?

"It’s really difficult to predict when each innovation will find an acceptable usage to integrate and modify our daily lives. In the field of insurance, we must not forget the context of use, because the reason of interaction is often very tough. After a car accident or my burned down house, I want to call my insurer, and so, I expect physical, human, reassuring contact. This human dimension cannot be fully digitized and that’s why for now we let the choice to the customer among traditional and digital processes considering the context."

"Considering experience is essential not to stay technology focus. We have to build long term vision, keeping in mind the maturity of the technologies and what is acceptable for the employees and the customers. », he concluded in a few words.