Advisers still have a role to play despite the move by life insurers to use technology to engage with younger consumers, the International Insurance Society’s annual seminar was told last week.

A panel discussion hosted by KPMG and featuring Allianz, Legal & General (L&G), Reinsurance Group of America (RGA) and Sun Life Financial heard leveraging technology to enhance the customer experience and deliver information is now as important as the actual products and offerings.

Sun Life says advisers must have the technology to engage with younger people.

“High-definition video conferencing, tablets with e-signature capabilities and other interactive mobile applications can make prospecting more efficient and expand their geographic reach,” it said in a paper delivered at the conference in London.

“Social media can be used to train, inform and motivate intermediaries.”

RGA sees technology as a means of overcoming challenges through automation.

“Cost reduction through improved operational efficiency is one of the clearest and most quantifiable benefits of many new technologies,” it says.

L&G says cloud services have cut entry and running costs for providing highly scalable online services.

“These innovations came at a time when many large companies – especially in the financial services sectors – were reducing investments in IT and running cost-reduction initiatives.”

But many life insurers have to introduce new technology while maintaining legacy systems.

L&G says stopping changes to legacy systems is easier said than done.

“Organisations should be looking for legacy service enablement technologies to try to minimise big core system changes, as well as looking at solutions to offload work from the mainframe.

“Implementing an enterprise portfolio management process will help make informed decisions as to which systems your organisation wants to tolerate, invest, migrate or eliminate.”