How to Extend Reach of Auto Insurance
In a time of industry transition, auto insurers should address more customer desires; breakdown services top the list.
In a time of industry transition, auto insurers should address more customer desires; breakdown services top the list.
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Mark Hodes is the founder and CEO of ForeverCar, a digital platform for powering vehicle repair plans. ForeverCar is helping insurance companies drive customer value and competitive advantage by offering flexible coverage options and top-rated support for vehicle repair plans.
Gen Z tops the list of groups ready to purchase Digital Insurance 2.0 offerings that include messenger apps and mobile quoting.
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Denise Garth is senior vice president, strategic marketing, responsible for leading marketing, industry relations and innovation in support of Majesco's client-centric strategy.
It's official! The ability to innovate will play a key role in determining the future success, even viability, of insurers.
It's official! The ability to innovate will play a key role in determining the future success, even viability, of insurers.
Why is it official? Because A.M. Best, the rating agency that is the industry's gold standard, says that "companies need to innovate to protect their ability to generate profitable business, and improve operational efficiencies and customer service" and that it "will be reviewing its Best’s Credit Rating Methodology to consider the inclusion of innovation in the assessment of a company’s business profile."
We know it's official because we have entered into an exclusive, multi-year arrangement with A.M. Best so it can draw on our Innovator's Edge platform to track the tens of thousands of insurtechs and other companies that will drive innovation in our industry. The need to innovate isn't exactly a surprise to anyone who has followed the insurtech explosion of the past two-plus years, but it's exciting that we're going to get to work with A.M. Best to help identify and measure the best of insurance-specific innovation practices for the benefit of established insurers, and to help A.M. Best to refine its projections.
Even though we live in turbulent times, we think that the insurance industry has unprecedented resources to draw on as it transforms. At ITL, we already have, in the aggregate, decades of experience setting up innovation programs, and that's just the start. The Innovator's Edge platform delivers the world of innovations and innovators relevant to the insurance industry in an online virtual community. The result is we all make each other smarter and can draw on the collective wisdom that the tens of thousands of innovators generate.
To codify that knowledge and to make it as widely available as possible, we've been working with our friends at The Institutes to develop curricula that will help insurers leverage approaches and programs that will deliver measurable growth through innovation. More on those as they become available. Stay tuned.
Have a great week.
Paul Carroll
Editor in Chief
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Paul Carroll is the editor-in-chief of Insurance Thought Leadership.
He is also co-author of A Brief History of a Perfect Future: Inventing the Future We Can Proudly Leave Our Kids by 2050 and Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn From the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years and the author of a best-seller on IBM, published in 1993.
Carroll spent 17 years at the Wall Street Journal as an editor and reporter; he was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize. He later was a finalist for a National Magazine Award.
Some insurance companies have extremely serious misunderstandings about the attorneys they hire.
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Bruce Heffner is general counsel and managing member for Boomerang Recoveries. He is an attorney with substantial business experience in insurance and reinsurance, underwriting, claims, risk management, corporate management, auditing, administration and regulation.
"Insurers don’t have the skillset to produce what customers want to buy; cyber products don’t cover the risks that clients are concerned about."
According to PwC’s 19th annual CEO survey, 61% of CEOs are concerned about cybersecurity, with everything from phishing to denial- of- service attacks on the rise.For the insurance industry, cybersecurity represents both an opportunity and a threat: an opportunity in that enterprises are crying out for coverage against the cyber risks they face, a threat because carriers, of course, hold large amounts of customer data and are hence targets for cyber-attacks and hacks themselves. A theme across this content series, and one we explored specifically in our feature on marketing and customer-centricity, has been the imperative for insurers to better engage with customers’ needs – before customers start taking those needs elsewhere. On the commercial side, cyber risk is therefore an enticing opportunity for insurers, as their clients’ businesses are only going to get more online, not less, and security risks abound (especially with anything IoT-related). However, cyber events are particularly challenging to insure against due firstly to their manifold knock-on effects, which range from barely quantifiable reputational damage to share-price collapse, and secondly to the lack of historical data. Substantial focus will therefore be required for insurers to fully realize the cyber-coverage opportunity.
"Insurers just don’t have the capability or the skillset to produce things that customers want to buy, particularly with so-called cyber products that mostly don’t cover the specific risks that the clients are concerned about. There’s a total disconnect there between the reality of business for all the Fortune 500 companies in the world and what insurers think they’re going to provide them by way of services and products." — Steve Tunstall, CEO and co-founder at Inzsure.comCybersecurity is a sprawling area, so this part of our series is primarily aimed at cybersecurity as threat, as opposed to cybersecurity as opportunity: What are carriers doing to protect their customers’ data and to mitigate against the threat of data breaches? We start with a look at carriers' attitudes to cyber threats like data breach, followed by a look at how – and how confidently – they are addressing these. To finish off, we cast an eye over the longer-term evolution of cybersecurity as carriers pressing forward with digital transformation seek, at the same time, to future-proof their systems. The following stats and perspectives are drawn from our Global Trend Map; a breakdown of all respondents, and details of our methodology, are included in the full report, which you can download for free at any time. 1) Assessing the Scale of the Cyber Threat 69% of carriers are "very concerned" about information security breaches.
While (re)insurers are open to the same sorts of attack as other large enterprises, the event we choose to focus on here is data breach. There is nothing that strikes so much at the core of the insurance business, which has been a data business since the very beginning; at the same time, (re)insurers – as professional data stewards – ought to be relatively well-placed to defend themselves. The harm that could come from a cyber breach at a carrier is multifaceted: Stolen data could cause customers direct commercial damage, whereas tampered-with data could render carriers’ risk models worthless, affecting both them and their customers further down the line. It is no surprise then to see the overwhelming majority of (re)insurers registering concern with information security breaches (94%). Cyber-attacks affect other players in the insurance ecosystem, too, and there are plenty of weak points in the "water cycle" of customer and company data; so we also encounter a majority concern among the other ecosystem players that contributed to our survey. See also: 2018 Predictions on Cybersecurity Our broader research suggests that data breaches are particularly high up the agenda in Asia-Pacific. We reached out to David Piesse, chairman of IIS Ambassadors and ambassador Asia Pacific at the International Insurance Society (IIS), based in Hong Kong, to understand more about what is happening in the region: "Digitization is leapfrogging in Asia, and so are industrial parks with smart devices and machine learning running the processing. Because of global supply-chain issues, this makes the need to mitigate and protect data integrity an urgency even without regulation where best-practice risk management must be implemented." Piesse continues: "Asia Pacific is only starting to look at regulations for data breach as opposed to data privacy laws, which have been around for some time. This leads us into the debate of the difference between privacy (encryption) and data integrity, which are two different arms of the cybersecurity triangle that must be embedded in all cyber risk management approaches. "The time from compromise to discovery in Asia is now on average 580 days, according to statistics. Therefore, we must assume compromise of data across time, as there have been no notification laws and hence no catalyst to mitigate. This is why there is concern in Asia Pacific. The take-up of cyber insurance in Asia is fairly low as compared with the U.S. and U.K. for this reason." 2) Filling the Breach#databreach is the Achilles Heel of the #BigData economy, and insurance is no exception. More in the #InsuranceMap! https://t.co/QH8z3aYH7y pic.twitter.com/Ac9fbLOPaK
— Insurance Nexus (@InsuranceNexus) July 26, 2017
Our respondents’ data-breach concerns are matched by high confidence that data security is adequate, and this probably has a lot to do with mitigation planning across their organizations. As we see from our graphic, three-quarters of carriers are confident in their security, and we find a similar level of confidence among respondents from the broader ecosystem. While these figures are encouraging, a quarter of respondents lacking confidence on this important measure is still cause for concern when we consider the number of customers that any one company can have. Even just a few percentage points of the ecosystem still represents rich pickings for online criminals and massive disruption for thousands, and potentially millions, of customers.3/4 of insurers are confident about customer #datasecurity & #privacy. More on #cybersecurity in the #InsuranceMap! https://t.co/QH8z3aYH7y pic.twitter.com/81JPs7Qch1
— Insurance Nexus (@InsuranceNexus) July 26, 2017
"Insurers have been very early adapters of computer technology. Given this maturity, one might think they should be able to control technology security on all layers, but the opposite is usually the case." — Oliver Lauer, head of architecture/head of IT innovation at ZurichWhen we turn to look at concrete mitigation plans, we observe that these are relatively commonplace.
However, 11% of carriers having no plan is concerning, given the absolute amount of business interruption this potentially represents (6% answered "don’t know"). Another factor to bear in mind is the potential fallibility of mitigation plans, so the proportion of carriers that are actually safe from security breaches will certainly be less than the 83% quoted above. We should also remember that data breach is just one type of cyber-attack and consequently just one aspect of (re)insurers’ overall cybersecurity strategy, which needs to be comprehensive.According to the #InsuranceMap, 11% of carriers lack plans for #databreach. Get the latest on #cybersecurity here: https://t.co/QH8z3aYH7y pic.twitter.com/oHVspQ7rb6
— Insurance Nexus (@InsuranceNexus) July 26, 2017
"Insurers are very late in the game of opening their systems for the digital age, and most of their software systems are 25 years old and older, and are "secure by nature" due to their legacy walled garden architectures. And now they are modernizing their systems at the speed of light, and their security architectures and capabilities can hardly follow." — Oliver LauerWe expect carriers – and all businesses for that matter – to continue ramping up their cyber defenses over the coming months and years, especially given recent high-profile incidents like the Wanna Decryptor attack in May 2017, which hit nearly 100 countries around the world. When assessing the full spectrum of cybersecurity risks, it can be difficult to know where to start and what to prioritize, so we asked financial services influencer Michael Quindazzi, business development leader and management consultant at PwC, for five key questions every insurer should be asking itself, from the board down:
— Who are our adversaries, what are their targets and what would be the impact of an attack? — What are the most important assets we need to protect? — How effective are our processes, assignment of responsibilities and systems safeguards? — Are we integrating threat intelligence and assessments into cyber-defense programs? — Are we assessing vulnerabilities against emerging threat vectors?As with building on unstable foundations, the risks from getting one’s approach to security wrong at the outset only get bigger the further down the road you go. We spoke to Oliver Lauer, head of architecture/head of IT innovation at Zurich, who frames the security conundrum in the following terms: "Insurers are implementing digital cores with full connectivity to everything, omni- and multi-channel and open API architectures, and usually they have no real idea what these new implementations mean for their security systems – they are still handling security like they did in the past with their ‘closed shop’ approaches. "This will lead – in my eyes – to very dangerous threats in the future. And even if they have recognized these risks and have the money to invest, it’s very difficult to hire the necessary resources. Everybody is looking for security experts at the moment.…"
What is clear is that today’s digital platforms introduce a fundamentally new security dynamic requiring a different way of thinking from security professionals at carriers.
3) Longer-Term Evolution
58% of carriers have updated their security strategies to reflect the rise of new digital platforms.
As we can see from the chart below, the majority of insurers and reinsurers have made adjustments to their security strategy to reflect the rise of digital platforms, and we get a similar figure when we consider our other ecosystem players.
For now, though, this is a small majority (58%), less than the 83% who had mitigation plans for data breaches. As the industry gets savvier about cybersecurity as a whole, we expect this figure to rise sharply. "With customer data-protection and privacy rules becoming more scrutinized across Europe and the globe, it is not a surprise that the chief information security officer is taking such a prevalent position within enterprises. The role will need to ensure appropriate usage of customer data and overcome digital privacy and security issues." — Sabine VanderLinden, managing director at StartupbootcampMost (re)insurers have updated their #cybersecurity strategies for new digital platforms! More in the #InsuranceMap: https://t.co/QH8z3aYH7y pic.twitter.com/b3ro6W1tV7
— Insurance Nexus (@InsuranceNexus) July 26, 2017
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Alexander Cherry leads the research behind Insurance Nexus’ new business ventures, encompassing summits, surveys and industry reports. He is particularly focused on new markets and topics and strives to render market information into a digestible format that bridges the gap between quantitative and qualitative.Alexander Cherry is Head of Content at Buzzmove, a UK-based Insurtech on a mission to take the hassle and inconvenience out of moving home and contents insurance. Before entering the Insurtech sector, Cherry was head of research at Insurance Nexus, supporting a portfolio of insurance events in Europe, North America and East Asia through in-depth industry analysis, trend reports and podcasts.
While most insurtech investment is still coming from nontraditional players, there has been a surge by insurers over the past two years.
This is the third in a four-part series. The two first parts can be found here and here.
It’s well established that insurers understand the need to innovate. Accenture’s Technology Vision for Insurance 2017 revealed that “86% believe they must innovate at an increasingly rapid pace simply to retain a competitive edge,” and a full “94% of insurance executives agree that adopting a platform-based business model and engaging in ecosystems with digital partners are critical to their business.”
See also: 10 Insurtech Trends at the Crossroads
Increasingly, insurers are turning to insurtech, whose digital products and platforms can help them in their quest to innovate quickly and at scale. While the bulk of global investment in insurtech is still coming from outside the traditional insurance space, we do see a significant increase in investment from insurers over the past two years.
Which technologies are attracting the biggest investments? Accenture’s report, The Rise of Insurtech found three key areas which accounted for more than half of the overall investment in 2016:
Let’s look at a few interesting examples of how insurtechs are leveraging these digital technologies to help them connect with customers in new and innovative ways.
U.S. insurance startup Lemonade uses AI as an intermediary at multiple touch points throughout the customer journey. At the beginning of the client relationship, the homeowners and renters insurance company has an algorithm to assess a new customer’s risk level (by cross-referencing neighborhood data, past claims and other factors).
While most insurance claims still require some level of human interaction, the bots are improving. Lemonade’s “AI Jim” helped the insurer set the standard for the fastest processing time when the bot reviewed, ran multiple anti-fraud programs on, then settled a claim for a policyholder’s stolen winter coat in three seconds. It typically takes traditional insurers 30 to 45 days to close a similar claim.
Lemonade launched quickly and attracted $60 million in stable investment by the end of 2016; insurers and investors are watching the company closely.
SPIXII is both the insurtech business and the name of its chatbot, a virtual blue parrot that “sits on the customer’s shoulder and talks to you.” It’s an automated digital agent that assists customers on their retail journey via a chat window on their smartphones. As with other AI tools we’ve seen, SPIXII learns from its customer interactions and can offer personalized insurance products in real time.
SPIXII’s interactions are friendly and conversational, making for a customer experience that is convenient and even pleasant.
Digital Fineprint uses analytics and social media data to provide insurers with insights into customer risk profiles and relationships. The startup uses digital technology to connect with customers where they are online, via social media, providing convenient and customized offerings and increasing sales by targeting a larger network. After receiving initial seed investment from venture capital, the insurtech is attracting attention from Allianz, which invited the company to its accelerator initiative.
What makes these startups such interesting entrants into the insurance space? They’re using digital technology to interact with and reach their customers where they are. They’re offering a customized, personal and interactive service, and investors and incumbents alike are paying attention.
See also: Top 10 Insurtech Trends for 2018
If you’d like to read more about insurance innovations, I recommend this series on the 2017 Efma-Accenture Innovation in Insurance Awards winners. You can register to read Accenture’s report The Rise of InsurTech here.
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John Cusano is Accenture’s senior managing director of global insurance. He is responsible for setting the industry group's overall vision, strategy, investment priorities and client relationships. Cusano joined Accenture in 1988 and has held a number of leadership roles in Accenture’s insurance industry practice.
Following U.S. tax cuts, companies should certainly reward employees -- and the same should be done in respect to consumers.
The chart above points out two things to me:
Perception can often become reality
The perception of the insurance industry from a consumer standpoint can be summarized loosely with the information above.
This perception ends up becoming reality for many consumers when they have more bad experiences with their insurance as well as when they see an insurance company spending money on things other than the actual consumer.
See also: Why Fairness Matters in Federal Reforms
I was having an e-mail conversation with a friend the other day about investing in the stock market vs. cryptocurrency. While we weren't talking about the insurance industry specifically, I thought his reply related well to what we do and how customers view us.
‘Maybe it will be a good year for the market, but the real reason I’ve enjoyed cryptocurrency investing is that it’s not these old, rich, greedy, corrupt fat cats who control the market and know more than I do. And for the record, I know nothing about crypto. Even if it’s hackers that are scamming people, I’d rather play with money there than bet on companies. It’s this idea of the old guard that I was talking about, and anytime something new comes that threatens to disrupt and change the way something is done people will always say it’ll never work and try and discredit it.’
Read that again. Replace cryptocurrency/crypto with insurtech startup.
Summary
I am fully onboard with rewarding employees if a company has a windfall of cash. This is how you retain and make happier staff.
The same should be done in respect to consumers.
Though it is from the utility industry, look at the headline from Baltimore Gas & Co.:
Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. wants to pass on $82M in tax savings to customers after federal tax reform.
Can you imagine seeing an insurance carrier make an announcement like that?
Being the risk-averse business that we are, perhaps not.
However, for the one that is willing to make an announcement like that, I’d be interested to see the direct impact to their NPS.
This article first appeared on Daily Fintech.
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Stephen Goldstein is a global insurance executive with more than 10 years of experience in insurance and financial services across the U.S., European and Asian markets in various roles including distribution, operations, audit, market entry and corporate strategy.
Representations and warranties insurance has emerged as a common tool in the current M&A market.
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Allyson Coyne advises clients in the areas of representations and warranty insurance and other transaction-related coverages through her position as a managing director in Aon’s Transaction Solutions team.
Home-improvement chains realize they are actually media companies -- and it's time that insurers learned the same lessons.
For example, consider the role of video as part of the customer experience. Any home improvement store that wants to stay in the game will realize that it’s actually a media company, and that it won’t win customers with just its ability to attractively display nails, lightbulbs and 2x4s. Instead, its future hinges on its ability to produce high-definition video and to manage, promote and publish useful content.
In action: Brilliant Basics and Cutting New Ground
Accenture worked with a home improvement chain to support its digital transformation. This chain has more than 1,100 stores and about 80,000 employees. We started with a hard look at the Brilliant Basics it needed to get right. For example, it took nine seconds for its website to load, and online customers needed to click five times to make a purchase. It’s easy to dismiss these as trivial, but customer expectations are set by online giants like Amazon, whose customer-centric data capabilities can make tailored recommendations and one-click ordering (never mind one-day shipping) its standard. In comparison, nine seconds is an eternity.
See also: Why Fairness Matters in Federal Reforms
Next, we identified areas for Cutting New Ground: what it meant for the home-improvement industry, and where the opportunities lay for this retailer. It meant going back to some fundamental value propositions. I mentioned earlier the complexity of buying a lightbulb—the same goes for nails. That was the nexus of one Cutting New Ground initiative. We visualized the Shazam of home improvement parts, fueled by AI and visual search. Customers simply take a photo of the part they want and are directed to it online or in-store. That’s just one of eight innovations that the retail chain put in place.
Three billion reasons to be brilliant
Importantly, the retailer needed do both Brilliant Basics and Cutting New Ground. Brilliant Basics effectively transforms the core of the organization (enabling it to serve its customers better), contributes to the organization’s overall health and supports a more stable foundation. It also reduces the cost to serve and releases capital for Cutting New Ground.
This particular project generated opportunities worth $3 billion, and the new initiatives generate 23% of the retailer's sales. This sales boost is new revenue, not produced by shifting customers from one digital channel to another.
See also: Medical Homes Change the Game
Convinced? With this case study in mind, it’s time to think back to the insurance industry. Next, I’ll look at some of the Brilliant Basics opportunities for our industry, and how they can be a blueprint for digital transformation.
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Michael Costonis is Accenture’s global insurance lead. He manages the insurance practice across P&C and life, helping clients chart a course through digital disruption and capitalize on the opportunities of a rapidly changing marketplace.
Both traditional insurers and startups grasp the tremendous gap in SMB coverage and the corresponding opportunities for growth.
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Denise Garth is senior vice president, strategic marketing, responsible for leading marketing, industry relations and innovation in support of Majesco's client-centric strategy.