The insurance industry has historically been characterized as 'risk-averse' when it comes to adopting technology, and the widespread reluctance is understandable. Keeping pace with the digital-induced disruptions in a highly complex regulatory landscape is not easy for insurers, who often find themselves in a tight spot while upping their technology game. On the other hand, with legacy systems, insurers are faced with the risk of irrelevance in the ever-evolving digital economy and an inability to achieve their business goals—be it to quickly launch new products, sell via new channels, or engage with customers digitally. The hard truth is, virtually all life insurers today are in a distressing situation: the legacy technology and even the "modern legacy" platforms that they have built over the years have become an impediment rather than an enabler. Why? Modern legacy platforms, while offering some configurability, are still predominantly code-driven systems with a vast majority of their functions supported via compiled logic. They require programmers, with skills in specific development languages/ tools, to make changes, and are often the result of vendor acquisitions, which are cobbled together with disparate technologies.

And the dust is far from settling. Code-driven platforms require a traditional waterfall approach or Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), which makes it challenging to deliver new capabilities in rapid fashion. Besides, they can result in a one-off code base, which, with each change and subsequent release, can create a platform version deviating further from the vendor base system. This makes it nearly impossible to upgrade and remain current with new releases, and it drastically reduces the platform's value to the insurer. Against this challenging backdrop framed by legacy systems, what insurers need is a modern and essentially 'future-proof' technology platform that can evolve with the dynamic needs of today's insurance industry. A proven formula to help insurers achieve this transformation is exactly what FAST—Flexible Architecture, Simplified Technology—can deliver.

So how exactly is FAST, a Verisk business, doing that? Staying true to its name, the company offers a fusion of robust software solution and deep expertise in technology and insurance processing to redefine the traditional insurance norms and practices, helping insurers prepare for the future. "With our breakthrough technology framework and pre-built insurance software components, we dramatically reduce the time, cost, and risk associated with major system initiatives," says Tom Famularo, the Co-Founder and Managing Director at FAST.

An Innovative and Fully Configurable Platform

At the center of FAST's solution is its powerful software. To explain its architecture, Famularo breaks it down into three essential layers. The bottom layer constitutes the FAST technology platform, which allows configuration of products, business processes, rules and calculations, and everything that goes into building the business logic. The second layer comprises the Insurance Components, which is an alternative to traditional large monolithic packaged systems to solve legacy core challenges. All the pre-built processes—policy management, claims, billing, and transactions—are managed through this interface. FAST's Insurance Components are the industry's first complete suite of business process-driven software components that are pre-configured and pre-integrated "out-of-the-box" for full policy lifecycle with true straight-through-processing. The topmost layer houses FAST's cloud services that enable companies to build new products from scratch or manage complex product structures and innovate easily.

Unlike the older, code-driven systems, FAST's innovative and fully configurable platform leverages a single technology framework and uses a common set of rules and calculations. The platform helps ensure that the existing capabilities are maintained, and new capabilities are created via configuration. It allows users to define new functionalities entirely, without having to rely on programmers or specific development tools. These capabilities can be quickly defined, utilizing agile concepts for rapid delivery.