Yannick Giguère, general manager of EstImage at Stelvio Australia, has spent nearly two decades developing software solutions that enable efficient services and reduce delays in the delivery of insurance benefits. In this interview, Giguère speaks about Stelvio’s new product and collaborative business approach, which have earned for the company an Insurance Business 5-Star Technology award in 2022.
Commenting on the challenges of communication in the property insurance sector, Giguère said many different suppliers have to be considered depending on the damage and loss involved in an insurance claim. Each of these suppliers – such as those who provide content replacement, specialist accommodation, and jewellery valuation services – uses their preferred software and claims systems to manage their businesses and relationships with insurance companies.
“You can imagine all those systems, they just don’t communicate [well] together,” he said. “What happens is that insurance companies and suppliers and brokers and owners, they’ll send up data and communicate using emails or phone calls. And the issue with that is it creates delays [which result] in poor customer services.”
To solve this problem, Stelvio has introduced a software platform called EstImage Property, which connects the various types of suppliers with the insurers.
“From a supplier’s point of view, they keep using their own system, but EstImage Property gives them access to all the requests coming from all the different insurance companies they work with, and then allows them to communicate seamlessly [about] the progress of claims,” said Giguère. The platform supports the exchange of live updates between all the parties involved in an insurance transaction, thus reducing delays. The platform also minimises unstructured data – a cause of inefficiency – “by centralising all the property supplier and claims data in a structured way” to speed up the claims process.
Giguère believes that, in the long run, success in the market depends not only on providing such innovative solutions but, more importantly, on cooperating with other companies and customers to discover potential areas for improvement.
“We are approaching business with collaboration in mind because we believe that’s the best way to service our clients,” he said. “We don’t believe in zero-sum games where winning means the other party is losing. … We believe in a win-win situation, and we listen to make sure that the solution we work on with the client is the right one.”
