“I think my message would probably be that technology transformation is the single biggest investment that we're making as a company,” said Neil Morgan (pictured above).
The Insurance Australia Group (IAG) COO was responding to a question from Insurance Business about what message he could send to brokers who often express impatience at the slow digital movements of Australia’s big insurance companies.
Morgan said his firm has listened to feedback and knows it must do more than deliver to brokers two years down the track.
“We’re pretty focused on how we can create incremental improvements in parallel with moving ourselves to a much more contemporary, technology backbone in our broker space,” he said. “Certainly, for policies, pricing and customer communications, that will put us in a great place for the long term.”
However, he accepted that this may not satisfy brokers.
Morgan is directly responsible for what IAG calls its “strategic change agenda” driving simplification, efficiency and operational resilience at scale. He was providing an update on his firm’s digital transformation progress.
“We have a complex legacy architecture for brands,” he said. “For the last few years, we've been focused on simplifying that architecture.”
One focus of the digital initiative is IAG’s Enterprise Platform, which the firm describes as its core insurance platform.
“The Enterprise Platform and the work to date has prioritized personal lines,” Morgan said. “For our direct business and our partners, we are utilising that capability – you may have seen that we announced a partnership with ANZ, for example – and that’s leveraging the Enterprise Platform capability.”
The intermediated space is next, he said, but suggested significant changes could be two years away.
“The broker environment is our next focus area, our next wave,” said Morgan. “It's long been a challenging space in terms of trying to achieve that level of seamless integration and support for all of our broker partners.”
IAG, he said, has a “pretty clear idea” of its long-term broker plans over the next 12 to 24 months.
“But we're also trying to use the work and the progress under the Enterprise Platform program and what we're doing around data and how we're supporting other areas of our business to really give us some tactical uplift in the broker space as well,” said Morgan.
Morgan said it wasn’t possible to specify particular parts of the intermediated business that will be the focus of upcoming digital upgrades.
“It's not really at that stage,” he said. “What we really want to make sure of is that we build a solution that gives us both seamless integration for brokers but also a really efficient process and business model right across the spectrum of underwritten and packaged business that we provide through our brokers.”
He suggested that digital improvements on the claims side of the business are already helping brokers.
“We have more than 99% of the claims coming into the company now coming to a single platform,” Morgan said. “That’s the space where we went from 15-plus claims platforms to one technology solution and with that comes a whole series of simplification opportunities and benefits.”
He said those benefits include improved customer communications and better claims management.
“I’d certainly like to think that that's coming through for our customers ultimately and for our broker partners,” said Morgan.
Morgan also outlined IAG’s company strategy that involves four pillars. He said technology is key.
“The first is growing with our customers,” he said. “We want to support more and more people and communities in Australia and New Zealand.”
The second pillar, he said, is around building better businesses. “So the rigor and discipline in our operations,” Morgan said, including in the intermediated business and the ability to “get really specific on our portfolio management.”
He said the third pillar involves “value from digital” and “using all the tools and tech available to us for our customers.”
The fourth pillar, he said, concerns managing risk and ensuring they have the right governance in place.
“If you look across each of those [pillars], the key enabler, undoubtedly, is technology,” said Morgan.
According to IAG, for 1H23, Intermediated Insurance Australia accounted for more than 30% of IAG’s gross written premium with net profits of nearly $50 million.
How do you see the digital transformation of Australia’s biggest insurers? Please tell us below.
