Those looking for evidence of the variety and flexibility working in insurance can offer need look no further than the career trajectory to date of Cath Frost (pictured) who stepped into her role as RSA’s Regions MD in early 2022. The move was simultaneously a natural next step and a chance to do something completely different, said Frost, who joined RSA’s finance team as an auditor as part of a graduate scheme almost 22 years ago.
Soon realising that audit wasn’t quite for her, she moved within the finance division where she spent the first decade or so of her career before joining RSA Motability where she moved through the ranks as finance director, then operations director and finally managing director. From there, she took on her present role - the remit of which includes looking after underwriters from all RSA’s regional offices, from Glasgow right down to the Channel Islands.
“I look after a team of about 280 people, who are predominantly underwriters,” she said. “And I’m not an underwriter but the way I think about it is that when I was MD of my previous business, there were three main facets to the role. Firstly, it was a leadership role where I had a team of about 550 people. Secondly, we had a strong customer base and lastly, there was the need for commercial acumen to drive growth and profitability.”
That’s not to say Frost wasn’t keenly aware of the differences entailed, having never previously been responsible for broker engagement. But when you get down to the heart of the matter, she said, those three fundamentals are the same across any such role.
“If you break down into simple terms, we’ve got a team of brilliant people who I lead, so I’m still able to be a leader, which I love,” she said. “We have customers – and in addition, we have our broker partners – both of whom we owe as brilliant a service as possible. And fundamentally, we are here to make money. So, as much as it’s a different customer base and I’m having different conversations there’s a lot of parallels you can draw between both roles.”
Frost noted that it’s an exciting time to be working with RSA now that “the mood in camp” is so much better two years on from the Intact acquisition. Before that, there was a feeling that RSA was getting a bit tired and a bit browbeaten, she said, but now there’s a strong sense that the insurer is “back”, a feeling reverberating both within the business and across the wider market.
“We know what we’re capable of and now we’ve got a parent company which has that same belief,” she said. “When they took us over, they were looking for a strong brand in the UK and one whose values aligned closely to their own – and those were so closely aligned with our existing values that they really felt like an extension of us.”
Digging into what the deal has meant, she highlighted that RSA’s mid-market regions business currently stands at just over £500 million worth of premium. There is an ambition to grow that by 50% over the next four years, she said, which is backed by Intact’s firm belief in its role in the wider UK strategy.
The Regions business has been set an ambitious growth challenge, but this is being backed by substantial investment into the resources required to meet that challenge. This has seen the recruitment of a brand new team to plug the gap that used to exist between online (sub-£2,500) and offline (£10,000-plus) trading, as well as significant recruitment and investment into RSA’s Glasgow-based e-trade and SME trading centre.
“They’re also talking to us about more tooling and more investment in infrastructure and systems, which isn’t looking to make a big bang in terms of a huge platform,” she said. “Rather, they’re encouraging us to think about what additive tooling might work with and complement our existing platforms and system - whether that’s about enabling our underwriters to write a policy in half the time or about making it easier for brokers to work with us.”
Feedback revealed that RSA’s responsiveness wasn’t where it needed to be, she said, so, a key priority was establishing a comprehensive contract strategy across the Regions business to make sure there’s always somebody placed to support brokers’ inquiries. It’s not about being groundbreaking, but rather making RSA as accessible as possible to brokers, and RSA’s most recent annual broker survey reveals that this is already starting to feed through to the market.
As part of this service-centric approach, she said, RSA is also undertaking a critical analysis of the commitments it has made to its brokers and the metrics that exist around those commitments. The business has introduced a series of measures in which underwriters are asked to contact brokers at key points along the customer journey.
The first is when an inquiry comes in and tracks how quickly RSA picks up the phone, or answers an email, or goes out to see the broker to understand more about a risk. The second element is about RSA developing its understanding of how quickly a broker requires a response to their inquiry. It’s not about assuming they need an immediate turnaround, she said, or assuming you have a week to respond, but actually asking the question.
“Then thirdly, once we’ve delivered, quite often we just leave that quote and if we win it ‘brilliant’ but if we don’t, we don’t go back and ask ‘why not?’,” she said. “That approach isn’t helping us to learn for next year. So, on each of those three points, we’ve got internal metrics and we track those on a weekly and monthly basis to see how we’re doing.
“We know that keeping our broker commitments is key to that customer journey. And we’re seeing month-on-month, that the delivery of those internal metrics is increasing and our underwriters are really getting into the swing of making sure they’re having those productive conversations, which actually does not just help the responsiveness piece but also improves our visibility.”
Another key area of focus has been branching out RSA’s Regions proposition, she said, which has included re-entering and reintroducing itself to the market in certain areas, including the professional indemnity space.
Amid the success of RSA’s recent Professional and Financial Risks (Profin) roadshow, which saw some 300 brokers attend, the insurer is launching a number of key new products in the Profin sector – including its design and construct, and pension trustee liability products which broaden out its Profin offering in order to help RSA become more aligned and relevant to its brokers and customers needs
Consistency, service and relevancy are at the core of the strategy Frost is rolling out across RSA’s Regions business and she highlighted the value placed on meaningful, iterative change as the key to unlocking great service.
“If we keep chipping away, we can demonstrate that we’re listening, that we’re trying to make things easier for our brokers and to be more visible to them,” she said. “We have to be out there front and centre, doing the right thing, and I firmly believe that will result in better trading and better relationships.”
