Data is king for insurance industry. Gone are the days when it was manageable to keep the data in files and still manage it.  Insurance industry can not survive without having online footprint accessible to its customer , broker, underwriters.

If I talk about insurance life cycle -

Customer opting for a Auto insurance policy will be first created in an underwriting systems.
Policy details needs to be provided in pricing system to get the required premium for the risk.
Engineering and risk assessment systems , will also need policy details to provide the details for risk engineers and asses the associated risk if its a property insurance.
Compliance checks needs to performed to certify policy risk location is compliance certified.
Once all these are in place, then policy is incepted and issued to customer.
There will be inflow of money as premium and outflow of money for brokerage, commission, surcharge and other liable state territory taxes.
Every insurance is payable for claim,  there are  claim liability which ends with policy expiry however there could be claims for next couple of year after expiry for other business lines in insurance.
If its listed company then require managing the finance, generate profile & loss statement and other statutory and compliance reporting.


In above life Cycle of one insurance policy, multiple systems are involved. Some organization can afford to build its own IT system while on the other hand , some would have mix of in-house & off the shelf/3rd party products and configure for its own use.

In whatever way you go, not a single system can handle everything and you will end up using different systems. With different System in place, I would for-see multiple challenges popping up starting with

• Require data to be integrated from one System to other Systems, e..g . Policy Details from Underwriting system could be data source for Claim systems. 
• Customer in Underwriting System, can become different while data is being entered in Claim systems. This could result in duplicate customer entry due to spell error, data entry error , system dependent uniqueness etc.  Marketing department are interested in identifying and repeating the business for loyal customer, without single Customer view it will not be possible.
• Other master data like location, policy status, Claim Status, Branches , company could also result in duplication , having problem in aggregating them to single view.
• Finance would be interested in aggregate view, which will lead to several intermediate manual manipulation of data and each user in company doing it in their own way. It will result lot of organization resource being vested in simplifying the data view and it will be having exponential growth with business growth and time passes.
• Timely availability of data could be very very difficult.
• Differentiation in Data due to manual reflection from one system to other could result in multiple issues.