Olivier Lafontaine:
When you're looking at transformation, we're not talking about a one-year project, we're not even talking about a four-year project. These are long, continuous transformations. At this point, most industries operate in a much smaller time frame. Life insurance companies are the ones we expect to be thinking in periods of 20 years. So that makes it so that there's not a whole lot of places to look for advice and examples on how to do this.
Anthony O'Donnell:
I'm Anthony O'Donnell and this is Life Accelerated, a podcast for life insurers striving to achieve digital transformation in 2025. The show will see some changes, including a new host whom we'll be meeting today. I'm delighted to introduce Olivier Lafontaine, Chief Product Officer at Equisoft. Olivier's experience in the life insurance technology realm spans software development, product ownership, systems implementation, and program management. When it comes to digital transformation, he has tremendous experience in creating the technology of transformation and he has been in the trenches managing large projects for major companies in the insurance and wealth management industries. Olivier, it's a pleasure to be with you here today.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Thank you. I'm delighted to be here as well and to take the baton for the next wave of this podcast.
Anthony O'Donnell:
Well, you're most welcome. So, Olivier, tell us a little bit about your background in your own words and how you're looking forward to hosting Life Accelerated.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Well, I will say I've been in the insurance technology sector for a good part of my career. I've done just about every possible job in the space. You know, from a software engineer, a business analyst, a product manager. I was a management consultant for a little while. Now, I'm a Chief Product officer and CTO. So I got a very interesting perspective, I feel, in terms of all the things that need to happen for insurance companies to be successful from a technology perspective. And so this is going to be an interesting opportunity for me to do something a little different. I actually have won a journalism award when I was in high school, so I'm kind of excited to go back to those roots in a way, so we'll see how that goes, but yeah, it's going to be an interesting way to talk to insurance executives from a slightly different angle than what I typically do, which is obviously a bit more commercial and from a sales angle.
Anthony O'Donnell:
Well, your experience is Going to be of great value to the podcast. 2024 has been a fascinating year for Life Accelerated and we've seen some important themes across the interviews. AI, of course, remains a very hot topic. Change management continues to be a major issue, particularly when it comes to staffing. Some other things, carriers are rethinking how they interact with policyholders and there are many other important and interesting topics affecting life insurance transformation. For example, no code, low code development, moving systems to the cloud, and of course legacy systems issues continue to be important. Olivier, what do you anticipate will be major topics during 2025?
Olivier Lafontaine:
Yeah, I think you touched upon them in a slightly different fashion, but I'm thinking for me, distribution channels and the evolution of distribution channels, the tooling the people around distribution is always an important aspect obviously of life insurance, but especially nowadays with everything happening in AI and in cloud and in integration between the distributors and the carriers, that equation changing a little bit. So that's going to be an area. Vendor independence is another area. We'll go back to that maybe a little later. Very important for me specifically attracting talent. You mentioned that that's a key aspect for insurance companies. And then I don't think we're going to be able to avoid talking about generative AI. And I think we're going to be talking a lot about large language models.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Like we're going to be narrowing down a little bit on AI to some specifics as the buzzwords are winning down a little bit.
Anthony O'Donnell:
And you know, I've typically asked guests what their definition of digital transformation is. And on the show we have looked at digital transformation with a certain amount of latitude. Like we look at the agent and customer-facing capabilities, which is what we most associate the term digital with, but we see the, the background technology to that as well. So I wanted to get your view on what digital transformation is within a larger technological and business context and what trends you see affecting insurance business evolution generally and digital transformation more narrowly.
Olivier Lafontaine:
That's a pretty broad, I think topic. When we talk about digital transformation, you're right. From different people and different vendors, you'll hear a different story. Because at the end of the day it could mean everything from digitizing documents and organizing workflows and organizing the back office in a more digital fashion. It usually means front-end tools and the experience on the web for either policyholders or brokers or agents, but I think and now it can also encompass web chat and chatbots and AI and all of this. So it can be pretty broad, but from my perspective, what it means in our space, in our industry, is really the process of updating your legacy systems, updating your core technology infrastructure to be able to support the more modern digital channels, so the web applications, but not only a website, but the transactional application. So then in that sense, it's every technology and people project that supports that modernization of either agent or user experience, or policyholder experience.
Anthony O'Donnell:
So I wonder what areas you see as bringing the greatest challenges to carriers. I mean, there's a lot of routine work, there's a lot of, you know, the kind of tedious day to day work, but when it comes to the transformation, what areas do you see carriers being most challenged with in achieving success? And where do you think carriers are likely to carve out competitive advantage?
Olivier Lafontaine:
So I think I have a pretty strong opinion about the challenges. I suppose the industry gets a bad rep a little bit on the basis of, you know, legacy and slow-moving and those types of things, but at the end of the day, you know, it's an industry that is based on managing risk. It's, it's an industry that's risk averse, but that's by nature, but that's by design. Nobody would want to buy a life insurance policy from a company that goes in all directions, always buys the new technologies and the shiny new objects. So because of that, it has a certain number of repercussions on the speed at which these companies are able to move, but it creates a whole number of different challenges that need to be resolved with technology. So for me, it means that everything they do, everything that an insurance company does, is long-term, right? When you're looking at transformation, we're not talking about a one-year project, we're not even talking about a four-year project.
Olivier Lafontaine:
These are long, even continuous transformations at this point. And this is the biggest challenge in the industry because you can't really copy that from other spaces. Even PNC doesn't really have this issue. Most industries operate in a much smaller time frame. Life insurance companies are the ones we expect to be thinking in periods of 20 years. So that makes it so that there's not a whole lot of places to look for advice and examples on how to do this. So digital transformation will be complicated. And then one key aspect of this, one key challenge, back to your question, is that it's easy to become dependent on vendors.
Olivier Lafontaine:
You typically will pick a horse. You know, we're usually talking about the policy admin system being the foundation for any digital transformation. Or it could be a CRM, for example. It could be, but there's usually a big piece of software that's underpinning the transformation and that's there's a vendor behind that, and you quickly become very dependent on that vendor. I mean, that's unavoidable and to some extent even desirable, but judging and controlling that dependency, mitigating that dependency, having tools, and this is what you mentioned, low code, no code at the beginning. So that's a key area where you can address the challenge, or a key tool to address the challenge, where you can make your own changes to the software, to the platform. You can adapt over time to react to either regulatory changes or to react to market shifts or different kinds of products that are popular or what your competitors are doing. And so being able to leverage the same core technologies or the same vendors for long periods of time, companies have the same policy admin vendor for 20, 25, 40 years sometimes, and we're just finishing an era.
Olivier Lafontaine:
I would say not to have any reference to Taylor Swift, but we're sort of finishing an era on that side. And now people are moving to a new, more modern set of technologies for the backend, but we're probably going to do, you know, that's probably going to stay for another 20 to 25 years, easy. So selecting the vendor, it's really important to take into account, you know, how am I going to be able to be independent so that I can react to the market without constantly being a bit at the mercy of the vendor? They're increasing grades and things like that.
Anthony O'Donnell:
Olivier, thank you for your thoughts. I'm sure our listeners are looking forward to your work as host on Life Accelerated. Since its debut in 2022, Life Accelerated has been documenting some of the most innovative activities from the largest and most influential life insurance carriers in the world. You can count on that continuing during 2025 under the stewardship of the podcast's new host, Olivier Lafontaine. Thank you for joining us for the Life Accelerated podcast. For more content to help you achieve digital transformation, visit equisoft.com/lifeaccelerated.
