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2021 Insurance outlook

Accelerating recovery from the pandemic while pivoting to thrive

In our 2021 insurance outlook, 200 industry leaders weighed in on their companies’ COVID-19 recovery efforts. How can the emerging lessons serve as a catalyst for business transformation?

Key messages:

  • The COVID-19 pandemic severely disrupted insurer operations, prompting an overnight shift to remote work and virtual customer engagement while exposing gaps in digital capabilities and raising cybersecurity concerns.
  • Deloitte’s global outlook survey of insurance executives found expense management more strongly emphasized than before the outbreak. However, rather than cutting costs across the board, most insurers are likely delaying or scaling back prepandemic investments in part to free up capital for higher priority projects and talent that can help them adapt sooner rather than later.
  • The need to accelerate digitization and enhance virtual operations turned headwinds into tailwinds at many insurers, driving faster action to deliver within the coming year what might originally have been three-to-five-year transformation plans.
  • Necessity might have been the mother of reinvention for many insurers during the pandemic, but the speed of change and much greater reliance on connectivity and remote access may also generate a host of new exposures for carriers and their policyholders, particularly in terms of cyber risk and business interruption.

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