Microsoft in financial Services: Trends and Technology for the Business Professional

-- Kevin S. Kelly, Microsoft Corporation

" Microsoft: Grab the Future or It Will Grab You "

By Lee McDonald
Executive Editor

Advances in technology and software are changing the course of business, but ot as fast and as radically as everyone sometimes thinks, Microsoft's representative to the insurance industry told insurers at a recent insurance technology conference.

Speaking in Boston at "Fulfilling the E-Promise," the annual A.M. Best fall information conference, Kevin Kelly, the head of insurance initiatives for Microsoft's financial services team, said agents don't have to be left behind in the information revolution--but many will.

Microsoft's strategy is to develop network-aware software that will allow systems to communicate, whether they are internal systems or tied into the Internet, Kelly said. "We want the technology to talk," Kelly said. "So you can use this for point of sale and you can use this for Internet, and then it doesn't matter how the battle falls out."

But companies and sellers that don't add value are going to be run the losers in the technology revolution, he said. "My personal position: If you can be replaced by a web site, if you're a point of sale professional, you don't deserve the customer. If a web site can actually in the mind of the customer and in functionality replace you, you don't deserve the customer."

There are many people who will not buy insurance from a web site. There are lots of people who won't," Kelly said. "800 numbers and submit buttons are very distant things. If you buy something over the web and your khakis show up the wrong size, you're life's not really impacted too much. But if you didn't insure your house properly for damage, this is a problem.

"There's going to be a mix moving forward. It's not going to happen overnight," Kelly said. "This is too new. We're at the dawn of the digital age. We're not even anywhere near exploiting this technology. We're at the very first baby steps of the digital age with the Internet and PCs. If you look at the adoption curves of television, microwave, telephone, radio, the long adoption curves it takes to get to saturation, we're not even on the chart."

The future belongs to the insurance segments that can best grasp the new uses of technology, right down to the grass roots level, Kelly said. "I think there will be plenty of agents moving forward. The ones that will disappear will be the ones that don't adopt to this, can't use the new technology and just have no perpetuation plan and they want out."