Having won the Technology Innovation of the Year award and offering a single point of access to over 50 best-in-class insurtech vendors, you’d think that insurers would be banging my insurtech door down to accelerate their customer-centric propositions. If only.
If we’re to nurture the necessary innovation that improves the customer experience, whilst enabling the UK insurance sector to be a digital world-leader, surely insurers and insurtechs must collaborate much more closely? Insurtechs offer the insight, technology and speed that insurers lack, and insurers can provide the financial support, real-life use cases and testbed that insurtechs lack. So why are insurtechs seen as just another B2B sales process, as opposed to genuine R&D partners?
Becoming truly customer-centric requires nothing less than inverting a set of legacy thinking, systems and processes, but instead insurers seem comfortable with the idea that given enough time, a bit of tech here and another tech sticking-plaster there will create the experience their customer wants. It won’t.
So what would I like to see more of?
- Don’t push insurtech vendors down, find ways to raise them up. Whilst plenty of money is earmarked for yet more industry memberships, events and consultants to talk about innovation, insufficient funds are allocated to support the insurtechs that actually create the early stage R&D the industry needs. This has to change. Direct financial support, whether that’s adopting an insurtech, funding proof-of-value exercises, or being prepared to co-fund enhancements to align insurtech product capability to an insurer’s standards (e.g product security, SLAs), should be a given. Even non-financial commitments, such as committing to a 6 month sales cycle, would enable insurtech vendors to more closely align their funding cycle to the sales cycle.
- Be more open. Rather than insurtechs having to guess at what you’re trying to solve, why not come prepared with a set of roadmap capabilities or a list of problem/opportunity statements you want to solve today? Engaging with an independent insurtech technology marketplace such as InsurtechPlatform.com or Salesforce can be a good way to find out what’s out there, and perhaps find plug & play solutions that can be deployed in days. Or, if you want to do a deep technical dive and accelerate a purchasing decision, I’ll be happy to organise a hackathon with 2-3 highly qualified insurtechs.
- Provide valuable feedback. Do you have concerns with the product, or its suitability for your business? If an insurtech vendor doesn’t pass muster, you do them a great dis-service by keeping them cling onto the future hope of a commercial opportunity when it’s a non-starter. Equally, I’ve seen a lot of insurers talk themselves out of promising tech because they haven’t understood the proposition or haven’t been able to sell the vision internally. That’s lose-lose. What’s needed are more open, honest and valuable conversations.
- Time is more than money. Insurtechs depend on new logo acquisition and timely commercial agreements not just to sustain their cost of sale and support with you, but to be able to secure further external funding to invest in their core product roadmap. Any delay to a commercial process with you can be the difference between an insurtech going out of business or concluding their Series A raise. See to it that you are concluding commercials like your own business depended on it.
Collaboration should be win-win-win, but insurers everywhere seem to have put up organisational ramparts (intended or not) that make actual collaboration incredibly hard and which threaten, daily, the insurtech’s very ability to survive. It doesn’t need to be this way. Let’s co-invest in R&D and make insurance better for customers.
Our insurtech gateway acts as the ‘glue’ for assembling fully touchless, next-gen customer experiences in the cloud that leverage best-in-class solutions from global insurtechs. If you would like to test any of the solutions or see them working side-by-side, reach out to us at hello@claimtechnology.co.uk or sign up for a trial account at www.claimtechnology.com.
