What’s holding you back from real-time tech?

“It starts at the top,” Wendy Watson, president of the Organization for Real Time Brokers Implementing Technology (ORBiT), told Insurance Business. “A brokerage principal has to decide that they want their brokerage to change how they do things. And then it goes to the line managers, and then there has to be enticement, encouragement and training – the carrot for the front line to change how they do things.”

 

What is holding principals back from introducing “real time” technologies at their brokerages?

 

Many may not be aware of the various real-time technologies available. Also, given the many different forms of “real time” technology that have already been introduced, it’s starting to become difficult to keep track of which carriers and vendors offer what kinds of real-time transactions. In fact, partly for this reason, it is difficult to know just how many brokerages have started to use real-time technologies.

 

A second huge obstacle may be a resistance to change. (continued.)

 

Several reasons explain why individual brokers are resistant to change. One is the generation to which most brokers belong.

 

The Insurance Institute of Canada recently conducted a demographics study of the property and casualty insurance industry in Canada. It found that a majority (35%) of brokers in the country in 2012 were in the ‘Boom’ generation, aged 46-65.  

 

Relative to the new generation of brokers rising through the ranks of the profession, the older generation doesn’t have the same facility with the new technologies as their younger counterparts, some observe. 

 

Also, there is a temptation to stay with processes that have been long established at the brokerage. Basically, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

 

“People who are attracted to the brokerage industry, they are detail-oriented and they like to follow procedures,” said Watson. “So they like to dot all of the ‘i’s and cross all of the ‘t’s. Typically those people have a really difficult time, when they’ve got a process that they trust and it works, moving to a new way of doing things.”

 

However, even brokers who embrace and whole-heartedly crave technological change may have issues getting things done quickly. That’s because they are involved in an industry that has been reluctant to change.

 

The institutional inertia can be partly explained by the various different stakeholders involved in the process – carriers, brokers, technology vendors, middleware vendors and consumers. Individuals and organizations within these groups may all bring their own different approaches – and pace – to technological change. 

 

Real-time technological solutions scattered among these groups may in fact raise issues of their own. 

 

“Because there are so many players in the industry…there isn’t one [simple solution] that’s doing it,” said Watson. And yet, she adds: “Band-aids everywhere aren’t working.”