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Tech innovators would be forgiven for looking at our industry and wondering how so little about the way it operates has changed in the past two decades.
Despite numerous launches, partnerships and joint ventures, there is still a perception that specialty (re)insurance, particularly those firms that operate out of EC3 in London, is run primarily on spreadsheets and binders held together with belts and stamped with liquid ink.
How refreshing then, to sit in on a gathering of luminaries from across our industry and discover that real, practical changes are taking place, and that seminal issues such as driving down frictional costs, improving customer experiences and benefiting from big data are being tackled – not just by brokers and underwriters, but also by a growing band of technologists.
While there remains a healthy dollop of cynicism around anything purporting to be a Holy Grail solution, there is a lot of discussion around managing risk more effectively, creating more transparency and openness in the industry, focusing on the move for digitalisation across the insurance space.
Perhaps the most interesting element for me, however, was the switch in focus around the value chain and the potential for disintermediation using insurtech.
The message from this roundtable was loud and clear – brokers, and their relationships, remain crucial to the future innovations in (re)insurance, but the intermediaries have to ensure they are delivering value inside and outside of every transaction.
Many reinsurance clients in particular are going through an enormous amount of transformation, but don’t have the scale to hire data or create their own innovation hubs. That’s an opportunity for brokers – to fill that gap and provide some of the resources that they lack.
For more fascinating insights from this behind closed doors gathering, read on…
Charlie Thomas
Content Director
Insider Publishing Group
Click here to download the (Re)Connect Executive Roundtable supplement