Kathmandu. Hong Kong insurers are at risk of losing customers to digital-first competitors. Unless they modernize outdated technology, it slows down their service, weakens fraud detection and limits automation.
Todd McGregor, head of markets for Asia Pacific and India, Middle East and Africa at Celent LLC, told Insurance Asia via Zoom. ’
According to McGregor, leading insurance companies have significantly improved their onboarding processes, their services and claims experience. “However, many are still failing to meet customer expectations for real-time interactions,” he said.
According to a report by Adian NV Edeon, 41 percent of consumers in Hong Kong prioritize customer experience when dealing with insurance companies. “They compare them not only with other insurance companies but also with digital services,” the report said.
Kai Tang, head of Adian Hong Kong, said GenG customers expect insurance companies to offer a mobile experience similar to that of e-commerce and ride-hailing apps. “They expect this from different industries,” he said in a separate Zoom call. ’
Fraud is also getting more expensive. Edeon found that 74 percent of Hong Kong insurance companies estimate that fraud costs them up to 5 percent of their annual income. While 55% said that older payment systems have reduced the ability to detect fraud effectively.
More than half still allocate resources to manual processing, and 96 percent continue to use checks for some payments.
According to McGregor, many insurance companies are trying to improve digital services without replacing their legacy core systems. “Companies are choosing to maintain their core systems and add orchestration layers that connect them instead of overhauling systems at scale,” he said. That’s because they support underwriting, claims, policy administration, distribution, and customer service. ’
The industry priorities align with the findings of Deloitte LLP’s 2026 Global Insurance Outlook. It identified core system upgrades and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) as key investment areas to improve efficiency and drive growth. “Insurers have invested less in customer-oriented technology than banks in the past, but that’s starting to change,” McGregor said.
“The best insurance companies have invested the time, effort and money to digitize the onboarding and servicing journey,” McGregor said, citing self-service tools, mobile services, AI-assisted support and simplified claim processing. –from Insurance Asia
