From the outside looking in, Solution Cell might not appear to have the greatest luck in terms of timing, hitting the market just in time to feel the impact of the dot com crash. Co-founder and client director Paul Jakeman (pictured) highlighted, however, how since those early days, the specialist management consultancy has navigated its way through a variety of crises from 9/11, to the 07/08 financial crisis, to Brexit.
Then came COVID-19. But with upheaval so tightly knitted into the very DNA of the business and considering that the function of Solution Cell is to help support clients through times of change, its team was able to quickly pivot and meet the challenges head-on. In fact, Jakeman noted, over the last three to four months, the firm, which supports clients including RSA, AXA, Marsh and AIG, has seen its strongest ever results in 21 years of operation.
“Our role in life is simple,” he said. “We’re here to help people change their behaviour. We look at that through two lenses – firstly from an organisational perspective, what do they need their leaders to do to drive business outcomes? Secondly, what do they need from their people who touch the customer, or the broker to drive business outcomes? And it’s behavioural change that’s our area of focus.”
Though it also works with clients from outside the insurance sector, Solution Cell operates the full gamut of insurance businesses, he said, with clients including general insurers, specialist insurers, reinsurers and brokers. Familiarisation with so many different business models has enabled the team to amass a really deep knowledge of the sector, Jakeman said, and to provide best practices from other industries as well.
“I think in some ways, you could argue that insurance isn’t different to any other industry, in that most businesses want to attract new customers and form the best relationships with the ones they currently have,” he said. “In that respect, insurance is no different to any other industry but in terms of the key elements that insurance faces from a behavioural point of view, there’s three that spring to mind. These are relating to technical expertise, the cyclical nature of insurance and the drive to use data to help make decisions.”
To the first point around technical skills, Jakeman noted that one of the main things Solution Cell has noticed is that for brokers and clients alike, it is no longer good enough just to be technically proficient. Typically, he said, when you look at insurance professionals, particularly in the underwriting sphere, you see a lot of gifted, highly-qualified individuals. But now clients expect more than that - they want somebody capable of building and managing a long-term relationship with them and they want creativity when it comes to solution-building.
“You’ve got a lot of bright, academic, technical people in insurance,” he said, “and what’s interesting is how the insurance industry changes those people to become much more commercial. Insurance companies are making use of that as a differentiator, but I think customers are also becoming more demanding and saying that they need this from their advisors.”
Insurance is much more cyclical than other industries, Jakeman said, so having the right mindset that allows professionals to adapt to market changes, to the hard-soft market flow of insurance, is essential. What is quite unique to insurance as well is the variance in the difficulties faced by individual lines during the same period. When a hard market is being faced in one geography or product, another could be doing very well. So, it’s critical to equip people with the right skills to handle that disparity.
If you have a young team, for instance, some of those people will not have faced hard market conditions before, he said, or the transition that comes with that. This is not seen to the same extent within other industries, which is why Solution Cell works closely with insurance businesses to help them create the skills and capabilities required to ride out those storms.
“To the third point around the use of data, we’ve got three or four clients now who have invested an awful lot in data analytics,” he said. “What’s interesting is that data in itself should really just be an enabler to help individuals make better decisions about where they spend their time and who they interact with. I think the data element is becoming a really big thing in insurance now. We’re seeing the role of an underwriter particularly changing quite a bit because data analytics is becoming so important.”
Given the breadth of the insurance industry, it’s impossible to generalise about whether the sector as a whole recognises the crucial interplay of these elements. However, Jakeman highlighted that Solution Cell is seeing an increasing recognition of the need to get better at managing renewals, navigating market cycles and adapting to the changing requirements of customers. There’s also more store being placed on emotional intelligence in underwriting, as well as the role of data analytics in operational success.
“For us, our focus is on taking a truly holistic approach to changing people’s behaviour,” he said. “I think a lot of businesses, and this isn’t just unique to insurance, they get hung up on a methodology. They want an amazing new presentation skills programme or a negotiations skills course, or a leadership programme that will change how their people do things. When we come in, we tell them it’s not a simple as that. If you’re trying to change how somebody behaves, it’s much more nuanced than that – you need to first win people’s hearts and minds.”
