The Camelot Network (Camelot Linkedin Page) held its first “Big Round Table” yesterday on the Future of Customer Driven Insurance.

This was a coming together of around 200 experienced people in Insurance, including many Independent Consultants from the Camelot Network. After initial intros and some inspirational presentation by Charlotte Halkett (Made by Many), Rebecca Bunyan (Lloyds of London), Evangelos Avramakis (Swiss Re), Sam Baigrie (Lifesearch), the group split into several breakout rooms to discuss and share ideas and experience.

There was a clear concensus that the future of Insurance, would, and should, be customer driven, the big questions were around how this would be achieved. Some of the themes that resonated were:

  • listen to customers (but how do you do that?)
  • understanding customer need – what they need, not faster horses
  • move away from a product centric approach to a protection centric position
  • move from risk to prevention
  • value people over tech

However, there were lots of hurdles identified as well:

  • Financial risk driven, quarterly reporting CFO in the lead
  • Cultural resistance to change
  • Too complex
  • It isn’t broken
  • Lack of real-time data

Finally looking at how to solve these issues and move to a fully customer centric model it was clear that there is a lot of work to be done. From my breakout room, there were a couple of very clear examples, a Travel insurer who was able to respond quickly to the Covid lockdowns by working with their carrier to retrofit cover and get their customers home which involved understanding your customers and their needs, having everyone in the conversations and being flexible and pragmatic. Another example was from Singapore, where a Life Insurer had added a debit card to their offer to get closer to their customers and to offer rewards and discounts, while at the same time getting more insight into their customer risk profiles (and an additional revenue stream). We should probably all be looking toward Asia for these innovations.

Interestingly, there was little talk about technology being the issue. There seemed to be a common understanding that the technology could be done, and the value was in the human changes.

Looking forward to the next one.