Efma, Accenture Announce Ceremony to Honor North American Winners of Their Global ‘Innovation in Insurance’ Awards

NEW YORK, March 1 -- Accenture, a global professional services company, issued the following news release:

For the third edition of their annual Innovation in Insurance Awards, Efma and Accenture (NYSE: ACN) are introducing a North-American awards ceremony, to be held in New York on Oct. 24, following the global awards ceremony in Paris on June 12.

Accenture and Efma, a global association comprising thousands of insurance and banking members, launched the global Efma-Accenture Innovation in Insurance Awards program in 2016 to showcase the most exciting and effective innovations in insurance. Although North American insurers will be among the global winners, the New York event will spotlight the best submissions from U.S. and Canadian insurers.

"These awards recognize insurers that are leading innovation and reveal the current state of the industry and where it is going," said Vincent Bastid, CEO of Efma. "Whether it's the use of drones to assess fire damage, connected devices that help reduce risks, intelligent predictions to decrease accidents, or new technologies like blockchain that help manage and pay claims faster - innovations are changing the face of insurance."

Recent research from Accenture highlights the importance of innovation in the insurance industry, finding that insurers that continuously innovate and adapt to changing customer needs will be able to capture emerging growth opportunities and outperform competitors. Specifically, the research found that North American insurance carriers that embrace innovation could generate up to US$128 billion in total new revenue, whether through new offerings for emerging risks like cyber security and autonomous vehicles; improved penetration of difficult-to-reach markets; value-added services that help reduce customers' risk; and harnessing existing assets such as data, platforms and algorithms in new ways.

"The insurance industry can't rest on its laurels in this era of massive technological disruption," said Michael Costonis, who leads Accenture's Insurance practice globally. "With today's challenging macroeconomic environment, changing customer behavior and wave after wave of new regulations, technology's role as an enabler has never been more prominent. The Efma-Accenture Innovation in Insurance Awards are a critical part of that process, recognizing those who are pushing boundaries and stepping outside their historical comfort zones to upend insurance as we know."

The 2018 Efma-Accenture Innovation in Insurance awards canvass the best solutions across eight categories:

* Artificial Intelligence: Innovations that leverage the disruptive power of artificial intelligence technologies - such as robotics, intelligent automation, natural language processing, machine learning and cognitive computing.

* Best Disruptive Product or Service (special awards category - live vote onsite): Innovations that enhance, extend or replace the traditional offering - creating new profit pools by serving new or existing customer segments in new ways and entering or creating new markets typically beyond the reach of insurance players.

* Claims Management: Innovative practices in claims management aimed at facilitating and/or accelerating the claims management process or improving fraud detection and prevention.

* Connected Insurance & Ecosystems: Innovations that use the internet of things to create new business models by combining insurance with technology, ecosystem services and partners.

* Customer Experience & Engagement: Innovations that radically enhance the way insurance players engage customers. New approaches may include seamless and personalized experiences across physical and/or digital channels, new customer management (service) models, and innovative management of customer loyalty and satisfaction.

* Global Innovator (special awards category): The most-innovative insurer - i.e., the organization whose corporate vision commits it successfully to continuous innovation and transformation, to the development and leadership of a broad ecosystem of partners extending beyond insurance, and to the exploitation of emerging technologies that improve its customers' experience and the performance of its business.

* Insurtech: The creation and/or application of innovative technology that substantially improves any part of the insurance value chain, enhances the customer experience, or explores new sources of value for insurers. New for 2018, this category recognizes the significant impact that insurtechs - insurance start-ups and spin-offs and insurance-specific technology firms - are having on the industry.

* Underwriting: Significant enhancement of the underwriting process through improved data collection and analysis or other advances to support personalization, efficiency and accuracy.