Just as we feel the strains of the SVB news and other economic factors I thought I'd post this reflection on the Ambitious Insurer Awards Insurtech Insights in London a few weeks back, so we can all take a moment to reflect a little on this wonderful industry.
Ambition is essential to progress. It drives the need to be better and to do better. Today’s ambitious insurers are building customer experience as a differentiation, expanding product breadth and depth and partnering across an ever-expanding ecosystem to bring new value to people’s lives. This is driving more fairness and addressing vulnerable customers so that no one is left behind.
Via Rory Yates, SVP Strategy at EIS Ltd
This ambition can be seen in embedding themselves into our payment transactions and our cars etc. to help us remove or avoid risk while ensuring they can adapt to an ever-changing environment and world. Ambition is vital in this next stage of evolution, and the competitive landscape will be dictated by those that aim high and ultimately deliver on these visions of the future.
As a platinum sponsor at Insurtech Insights Europe 2023, EIS Ltd partnered with the show to launch The Ambitious Insurer awards. The objective was to provide insurers with a platform to recognise and celebrate their teams’ most ambitious and innovative initiatives.
This wasn’t about narrow categories or being constrained by how insurers operate today. These awards were about celebrating insurers pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and using innovative thinking and modern technology to re-imagine how insurance itself could and should work.
This wasn’t about narrow categories or being constrained by how insurers operate today.
And yes, it really did deliver! Over 150 submissions, 19 finalists and 13 selected to present their case at the event in-front of a stellar set of panellists. With one winner announced at the end of the day - this was high exposure and high stakes for those who made the cut.
These awards revealed or perhaps reminded us of something really important. Ultimately, insurance enables us to do things we wouldn’t otherwise be able to take the financial risks to do, freeing people, businesses and societies in the process. Something that’s all too easy to forget or dismiss in the forest of complex business models, administration and massively constraining technology and cost structures.
Whilst it’s fair to say the sector has been caught behind in recent technology lead transformations, the potential now to drive up insurance companies value to the world has never been higher. It’s this ambition that had clearly fueled all 13 of the submissions presented at the awards. A real industry showcase. We heard from Nationwide, Aviva, Allianz Reinsurance, esure Group (twice), ERGO Group AG, Allianz, @Parametric, Generali, Smile Insurance (by Huskify), @Gard AS, LiveWell Asia and Zoundream & @HITS. Their stories were full of ambition.
There was a travel Insurance venture, where finding a medical service or outcome was seamless and removed the need for a claims process. There were large partner ecosystems allowing brokers to shape propositions and deliver the right outcomes to their customers. There was a Swiss start-up that has created an AI application that analyses babies’ crying and that it could identify early signs of health problems and what a baby wants using machine learning and a bank of data.
These were stories of customer experience excellence, innovation, venturing and new business models shaping how the insurers tackled the opportunities they sought and eventually grappled them to success. They were lean start-up stories, at scale and successful.
The winner was no exception and much-deserved for their pioneering work providing weather insurance for cocoa farmers on the Côte d'Ivoire. Many said afterwards that this heart-warming story really spoke to what insurance is all about.
Allianz Reinsurance and @OKO's winning initiative leverages technology and data in novel ways to ensure it meets the needs of Côte d'Ivoire’s rural farming communities. This includes remote sensing supported by satellite data that monitors elements like soil moisture and evapotranspiration.
In addition, OKO uses novel data science to design index insurance products that are improved every year through fine-tuning. Further, the products also leverage mobile money, making them accessible to all farmers remotely and digitally. This is what insurance is about, and a great example of ambition driving an insurer to success, and making humanity better in the process.
At the heart of all transformation today somewhere is technology and data, sometimes this is straight-forward, but all too often it requires the right business and core technology architecture to make it happen.
In this next stage of the insurance industry’s evolution, the ambitious insurer will continue to make our lives better, which will see them adopting the ecosystem model that is driving other industries to thrive and reshape the competitive landscape in the process.
Putting humanity and planet first, we can all be very confident that insurers will deliver this change and this will in turn benefit all industries and economies in the process. This display of ambition was not only heart-warming it showed just how vital this industry really is.
Here’s to the ambitious insurer and all our future success with it!
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