Feel like you’ve heard it all before?
Insurers launching new products and claiming that brokers can reap the rewards is nothing new. However, this time Covéa Insurance is hoping to go one step further by actually listening to brokers and designing products based on their feedback.
The company has just launched a new packaged product aimed at retail and salons as part of its small business proposition. It is designed to be sold online by brokers and incorporates the best elements of its existing shops and office products but with a broader risk appetite, new covers and higher limits.
Insurance Business UK reached out to Siddharth Gulati, small business underwriting manager at Covéa, to find out how brokers were involved in the creation of the product.
“Earlier this year we carried out a broker survey and asked brokers what they would like to see included, this was followed up by face to face meetings to get a clear picture of what a ‘best of breed’ product would look like from their perspective,” he said.
“With Packaged Retail & Salons, we’ve taken the strengths of both the existing Covéa Insurance and ex Sterling products to create a highly competitive product in this market sector, so it’s a genuine ‘best of both’ for our brokers and customers.”
Packaged Retail & Salons was launched through both Acturis and the company’s broker extranet on August 15, with both platforms offering functionality for brokers to vary commission and premiums. Online trading will be supported by a guaranteed thirty minute referral response provided by the Covéa Insurance small business trading team and Gulati believes that brokers are increasingly confident working in an online environment.
“We are seeing more business placed through our online platforms than ever before,” he said. “We feel that by offering clear and comprehensive wordings it can help with broker confidence so that they know they are offering their customers the right products, and have access to the trading underwriters in the small business team to get a fast response when they need it.
“Brokers can access the product through the Acturis platform or via our dedicated broker extranet site, ‘Covéa Insurance Online’. Brokers are already trading with us using these platforms, so most will already be familiar to them. The online quotes are supported by the equally important offline service from the dedicated small business trading team, with a guaranteed referral response within thirty minutes, which we believe to be genuinely market leading.”
Packaged Retail & Salons is the first of three new online products for small businesses that Covéa Insurance plans to launch in the coming months, with Gulati also giving a hint about what’s to come.
“We are currently overhauling our entire small business product range to give brokers a complete suite of new online products for small businesses,” he said. “Property Owners and Offices are products in the pipeline and will be launched in the coming months.”
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