Insurance companies must face up to change as customers take the reins when it comes to how they want services delivered – that’s according to an exec at major insurance software provider SSP.
The market is in a really exciting place, SSP’s customer and marketing managing director, Adrian Coupland, told Insurance Business.
“There is so much good, creative stuff coming through, and coming from different places,” he said. “It feels to me almost like every week of innovation we are seeing currently is equal to 10 years of innovation five years ago... the market is experiencing a rapid pace of innovation which is great.”
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Many insurers are already investing heavily in innovation strategies and tying up with newer players: Take Aviva’s partnership with start-up incubator Founders Factory, or Allianz’s investment into insurtech hit Lemonade, for example. But there are even more changes to come, according to Coupland.
“The innovation and disruption is great, but it does pose a broader set of questions for the market to answer around all of the experience and knowledge that is in the market currently, and how it is deployed. Where will it be deployed in the future with all of these great creative things coming through?” he commented.
Particularly as trends such as artificial intelligence (AI) make headway, there’s a lot to be considered in terms of how the industry will have to adapt: “The next step will be, how does AI drive more efficiency and automation through the process?”
The concept of a reduction in manpower off the back of AI growth is one that “has to happen really,” Coupland claimed – but those changes are driven less by insurers and more by customer need.
“It’s not the insurance industry which is creating that. It’s all coming from consumer demand, efficiency and effectiveness of trading,” Coupland commented.
“The power of everything is really with the consumer now, and therefore if a consumer expects to engage in a certain way or be serviced in a certain way at a certain pace, at a certain point in the day, then the service providers have to do that.”
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