What are the most challenging aspects of running a successful insurance business? According to one CEO, the answer is overcoming a lack of innovation in the industry, as well as finding great talent.
Many insurers are too slow and not inventive enough when it comes to products, the chief exec of online SME broker Constructaquote.com, told Insurance Business.
“The industry is inherently slow, not creative enough, and lacks sight of opportunity,”
Lyndon R. Wood said in an interview, pointing out that the issue is one of the bigger challenges he faces in running his business.
“There’s a degree of arrogance with insurance companies… they don’t really look for ways to do business, they almost look for ways not to do it,” he said, adding that insurers should do more to proactively seek out brokers to partner with.
Finding talent can be difficult too, Wood said.
“It’s hard to find the experience in what we do, so we have what we call a flight path, where we train and educate people – we bring them in at one level and we educate them over many months and give them that career progression,” he noted. “We home grow a lot.”
Alongside industry hurdles, Constructaquote.com has weathered many of the external challenges that businesses have faced in recent years, from political upsets to the last financial crisis.
“I’ve always ridden the waves – when there’s a recession, I don’t even call it a recession… In the last, [the 2007-8 financial crisis] I employed 50 people. While others were contracting, refinancing, making redundancies, I didn’t have legacy debt, we’re debt free.”
As for Brexit, is Wood worried? “No not really, and I don’t think anybody really knows whether it’s going to affect us to a large degree, a small degree, or not at all,” he said.
“We’re a schemes delegated underwriting MGA broker, we’re not your standard broker and that’s been our success. We’ve always liked to take a degree of control in pricing, document issue, our systems – we like to have some of that control in order to deliver better service to customers and all of that good stuff.”
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