Over the last year, I’ve questioned how we can change the perception of insurance. If we want to lead banking rather than vice-versa, then we have to stop telling ourselves that we’re all about the customer, and be more open and honest about the fact that we’re anything but. We need to move from selling empty, grudge-based products we hope customers will never use, to its opposite; creating products that customers value and therefore want to buy.
I’ve looked at how we could lift the insurtech sector as a whole, by changing our mindset from thinking in terms of competition to defaulting to it’s opposite, collaboration. We stand more to gain as an industry when we are open to ‘co-opt’ with those that we think of as our competitors, or adopt an insurtech that we think could be a future challenger. In the Social Mobility issue, I suggested that the path to meritocracy was to be found not in the pyramid-like corporate hierarchies that are designed to keep employees in check, but by introducing its opposite – a flat, zero-hierarchy company where all team members are encouraged to see themselves as leaders, an idea currently being scaled at Claim Technology.
As we consider what 2024 may hold, it seems timely to reflect again on ideas that are opposite to what we believe to be true, but which counter-intuitively may hold the key to growth. Claim Technology has been the ‘new kid on the block’ from insurtech 1.0. From being the first insurtech to offer a Claims-as-a-Service model, where claims processes could be re-imagined and re-designed in the cloud as a wrapper over legacy systems, to being the first insurtech in 2.0 to offer an Insurtech Marketplace with plug&play solutions that could be deployed with a single click, Claim Technology has a proud history of thinking differently and re-defining how we approach technology to achieve the change we seek. I’ll therefore end the Thinking Upside Down series on a technology note.
Over the past few years, we’ve become accustomed to the term ‘build or buy’, questioning whether it is better to build solutions in-house or buy-in technology from elsewhere. Almost universally, we now default to the latter, yet whether you choose to own the tech or not, it seems that you’re still left with the complexity of managing these systems. The same relationship holds with automation and productivity. Despite 30 years of business process automation, where we were meant to be relieved of burdensome admin and re-assigned to focus on more value-added tasks, employee productivity hasn’t improved much at all. In fact, it may have fallen, and if GenAI follows the same trend, we should expect more of the same.
Thinking upside down, perhaps we have focused on the means rather than on outcomes? Have we all been seduced by the promise of the latest technology as a silver-bullet cure for all ills? Sucked into cycles of replacing whatever we had before with newer technology, but with the same results? What if instead of focusing on the inputs, we focused on the output, or said differently, switch from the need to create to the desire to simply consume? The rise of embedded insurance is a positive step in this direction, to the extent that you don’t have to create or even know anything about insurance in order to sell it. You just consume a snippet of code that you can embed on your website, or inside your point of sale. This simple idea is enabling banks, retailers and anyone else to knock out the direct relationship between insurers and consumers.
In a similar vein, Claim Technology is leading the way with ‘embedded claims’, or in other words, the idea that you don’t have to build your own claims processes at all. You can simply embed a claims resolution capability into any channel, enabling customers to self-serve the resolution of their claims within seconds. To me, taking five minutes to achieve the Holy Grail of claims transformation by consuming nothing more than a snippet of code is far preferable to the opposite strategy we’ve all been working with for the last 30 years. Hopefully the new kids forming the Next-Gen of our insurance workforce will agree with me.
