Exerting the uncanny regularity of all red-tape bound tasks, the bi-annual reminder that it’s time to visit your local optometrist to see if your prescription has changed rarely prompts enthusiasm or anticipation. Having your eyesight checked sits comfortably alongside to-do list items such as having your car serviced or doing the laundry – a time-consuming but necessary evil.
It’s the necessity that is the key takeaway here, that mother of invention from which progress is born and borne. Updating your vision offers you a clearer view of both the pressing and potential risks that you face and the obligation facing UK insurance professionals to examine and, where necessary, update their world view with at least the same consistency that they do their eyesight is only becoming clearer with each new shock and aftershock that hits the UK economy.
It’s not always an easy task. Oftentimes a defining feature of short-sightedness is the inability to recognise it for what it is. And with so much happening in the market from an economic, regulatory and technological perspective, businesses could be forgiven for zeroing in on keeping their heads, and the heads of their stakeholders, above water.
It’s an approach that in another time could likely hold up with some effectiveness. Not so today, given the dual blow that consumer expectations have evolved too far, too fast to accept anything less than the service available elsewhere in financial services while, perhaps even more crucially, the reality exists that not all companies are in that position.
All across the market, there are signs of how insurance businesses are creating products and solutions not just to serve the changing needs of clients but also to help to craft an environment that emboldens and even inspires new innovations.
As emphasised by CFC’s Michael Brunero in a recent feature, the task at hand for companies is to look at their clients through “the eyes of today”. The industry can sometimes be a little slow-moving, he said, and it needs to accept that time and technology are marching on and that if insurance professionals are going to do their jobs effectively, they need to do the same. The Microinsurance Network’s own Katharine Pulvermacher echoed similar thoughts when she highlighted the protection gap between where inclusive insurance should be and where it stands.
Insurance is a massive industry, she said, but it remains underdeveloped in much of the emerging world and while more insurers are entering the inclusive insurance space, that shift needs to accelerate quite rapidly. The call for the insurance sector to embrace evolving opportunities - be it for new products, client communication, partnerships or technologies - is a resounding one and it refuses to be ignored in favour of the status quo.
Much as with your eyesight, there is a variety of options for those businesses looking to enhance their visual range – some more permanent than others. From my conversations with some of those professionals helping lead or support companies who are confident in their vision of the future, some key recommendations arise:
A decision taken up by one firm may be swiftly copied elsewhere in the market before the disadvantages of that particular conclusion become clear. And in those cases, it is opting not to take the road less travelled that truly will make all the difference.
