The success of insurance and financial services companies over the next five years will be determined, in part, by their use of business analytics and intelligence.

A new LIMRA global survey shows that more than 80 percent of IT executives believe the increased need for business analytics and intelligence will have a considerable impact on the success of their companies.

LIMRA asked financial services experts to identify and analyze emerging technologies and potential challenges that could affect the distribution of insurance and financial services.

Here are some of the technologies and issues they mentioned:

• A new approach to reach younger generations will be necessary. Consumers in their 20s and 30s have grown up with the Internet and use it daily. Thus, the IT experts say, more consumers will expect online service capabilities, the ability to see all products they own with a company across all business lines on a single screen, and easy-to-use, self-service Web sites.
• Adoption of electronic business processing technologies, including online application processing and e-signatures, will save companies money in terms of marketing and distribution and improve service and save time for the customer.
• Detecting and preventing the unauthorized use and transmission of confidential information will be a high priority in the next few years, said more than three-fourths of the IT experts, given how costly data breaches can be in terms of brand impact, customer loyalty, and record recovery.
• As social media expands into the business environment, reputation management will be critical, said two-thirds of IT executives.

“Beyond the obvious expanded use of the Internet to enhance marketing and customer service, our survey revealed that data mining, predictive modeling, and forecasting will be vital to insurance and financial companies as they seek to remain competitive,” said Mary Art, LIMRA research director and author of Tech Quake: Predicting the Global Impact of Technology. “While insurance and financial company databases have typically been rich with information, the ability to leverage the data across business lines to form a complete picture of their customers has been a challenge.”