Of course, anyone who has studied numbers can also work for an insurance company, for example as an actuary or actuary. But times are changing in insurance – and with them the jobs. Where previously it was primarily business experts who were in demand, today creative minds from other disciplines are also working on innovative ideas for the digital future.
Boring tasks, boring series of numbers, a dreary office job - working for insurance companies is full of clichés and is not considered particularly sexy. “But you definitely shouldn’t let the prejudices about the industry put you off,” says Julia Steinmetz decisively.
App for healthier customers
The 30-year-old works in corporate development at Generali Deutschland AG and the name of her working group is anything but dusty: In the “Digital” team within the “Strategy and Smart Insurance Transformation” department, her job is to run the second largest primary insurance group in the world prepare the German market for the digital revolution.
© Generali Deutschland AG
“Our task, for example, is to further develop Generali’s smart and innovative insurance products in Germany.” For example, the “Generali Vitality” program, which customers can take out together with an insurance product such as occupational disability or term life insurance, and which supports them in doing so to live healthier. “On the basis of a voluntary health and fitness check, you can set personal goals and, among other things, are encouraged to do more exercise or attend preventative care appointments,” says Steinmetz. “We are primarily trying to appeal to our younger and digitally-savvy customers.”
The team pays particular attention to the customer experience: Is the app easy to use or can it be improved if necessary? And how does the insured person obtain relevant information about the product? “Of course we also monitor the market, for example, we look at what product solutions other insurers offer,” continued Steinmetz. “Together, including with product development, we then create new solutions.”
Numerous disciplines welcome
But the team does not only provide an interface to this area. “We work with all Generali group companies in Germany and, in principle, with all departments,” says the cultural economist. “After all, we not only provide the impetus for new digital products, but also for processes that we can digitize in order to become smarter and faster.” A necessary step towards the future that other insurers have also recognized as important: many of them have already set up digital and creative labs in which interdisciplinary teams work on new products and services.
“It is surprising to many people what different specialist areas can be found in a health insurance company,” says Hella Schillings, Head of Human Resources at the BARMER health insurance company. “We employ academics from a wide range of areas: for example information technicians, journalists and doctors.
Generali employee Julia Steinmetz is certain that the entire industry is currently facing exciting challenges: “As part of the smartphone generation, this is a good opportunity for me to get involved in these exciting topics.”
Diverse interests – diverse tasks
The 30-year-old had not planned her career in the insurance industry at all: After graduating from high school, she first worked for an event agency for a year, then studied cultural economics in Passau and then went abroad for a year to do internships in HR at Henkel and in the PR department of the pharmaceutical company Merck. “Between my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, I worked in a consulting firm in the controlling and finance area before I did my master’s degree in international business in Grenoble,” she says. She started working at Generali Deutschland AG through an international trainee program.
“As you can easily see from my CV, I really enjoyed a lot of things,” she adds with a laugh. But one thing became more and more clear over time: she wanted to work in a large international company in the future: “I find the challenge of being able to make a difference quickly as part of a team exciting. And one thing is certain for me from today’s perspective: there are diverse and interesting job opportunities in an insurance group.”
IT people just sit in the basement all day - because of that
A fact that Jonas Herkommer can fully agree with. “I made a conscious decision to work in a large company,” says the 29-year-old, who works as a solutions architect at BARMER. “As an IT professional in particular, it is extremely important to me that my knowledge does not become outdated. Here I work with the latest technologies, can learn a lot thanks to excellent external advice and also always have the opportunity to try things out.”
After graduating from high school, Herkommer initially studied applied computer science and worked at the IT and consulting company IBM. “In the year and a half that I continued to work there as a consultant after graduating, I got to know many other companies,” he says and adds: “That's why I can also compare it with jobs at other companies, for example banks or Electronics companies, assess that working for an insurance company is anything but boring.”
But what does his everyday work as a solutions architect actually look like? “First of all, it’s important to emphasize that we don’t sit in the basement all day and think up software solutions,” he says with a laugh. As part of the development team, his job is to implement technical requirements in a specific system.
Send health certificate digitally
Herkommer explains exactly how this works using a specific example: “Some time ago we got the idea from the marketing and sales department that it would be pretty cool if the insured no longer had to send us their certificate of incapacity for work by post, but simply could be photographed on a cell phone and transmitted to us digitally.” The particular difficulty: social data, which includes this information for the health insurance company, is subject to strict data protection regulations in Germany. “We also had to guarantee the authenticity of the documents,” says Herkommer.
The team to which the IT specialist belongs and with whom he developed the software solution consists of three pillars. The front link in the chain is the enterprise architect, where a new idea lands on the table first. “He thinks about which system is suitable for the technical implementation,” says Herkommer. In this case, the mobile phone app is used to photograph the document and transfer the data in encrypted form. There was also another system to process the data and one to record it internally at BARMER.
“Depending on how complex the task is, the enterprise architect can assign it to the system in which the requirement is to be implemented,” says Herkommer. “In this case, however, there were so many systems involved that the enterprise architect consulted with the solution architects via video conference to jointly consider a suitable solution with which the data could be received and processed.”
Herkommer goes on to say that these were ultimately implemented by the software developers, who form the third pillar of the team. “And if everything goes well, the app images will ultimately be processed purely by machine.”
From algorithm to human
When it comes to workflow and organizational structure, Jonas Herkommer says he can't see any big difference to working in an electronics company or a bank, which he got to know in his previous job. What is relevant for him, however, is the work attitude: “If something doesn’t work for us, it’s not like a large online shop where customers can no longer carry out their orders and we might just lose money,” he says. “Our insured people have a problem and we want to help and support them. The fact that we are there for your health is a great responsibility – that drives us and makes working at a health insurance company special.”
And for Julia Steinmetz, thinking about customers also plays an important role in her daily work: “Although we are developing an algorithm at the core of our product, we are extremely close to people's everyday lives - and that is exactly what the insurance industry does what makes it so exciting for me.”
Trend Smart Insurance: How IT professionals lead insurance companies into the digital future.
