Bringing together 100s of insurance brokers from across the UK – and beyond – the recurring theme of CFC’s second UK Summit concentrated on the firm’s mission to build the insurance company of the future. For technology underwriter Amy Hurwicz what this means is “innovation and ease” – a view shared by UK distribution leader James McNamara who offered an update on CFC’s Connect platform and how its true utility lies not in its complexity, but rather its simplicity.
The simplicity of CFC’s Connect Platform resides in its ambition to create optionality, he said, because CFC is completely agnostic regarding its brokers’ digital strategies and how they choose to digitally trade. Whether brokers want to access the Connect platform directly, or link it to their own technology platforms using an API, or simply email in a PDF proposal form or pick up the phone to an underwriter – the option is there.
At the CFC UK Summit, McNamara highlighted plans to expand CFC Connect beyond cyber which is presently the only product the company e-trades in the UK market. Behind the expansion is a simple question, he said – what if CFC expanded its data enrichment functionality when it comes to all the valuable and time-consuming data points collected during the insurance buying process?
“What if we additionally started acquiring information such as licences, registrations, customer testimonials, customer complaints, announcements of new products, new services, new partnerships?” he said. “If we expanded the scope, we could start to acquire additional information that supported the underwriting process of products beyond cyber, such as PI or D&O.
“What’s next for CFCs digital strategy, and what’s next for Connect is Multi-Product Connect. We currently have broad product distribution in the UK and globally. And with George Beattie’s [head of innovation at CFC] innovation team, our product distribution is only going to increase in the future. Over the next two to three years, CFC will vastly increase Connect’s current footprint, and apply the same data science and advanced automation that’s currently deployed for cyber across the entirety of our product portfolio.”
Not only will this open up all of the benefits of accessing Connect to a broader product range, beyond cyber, he said, but the additional impact this will have on CFC’s underwriting teams and consequently its strategic distribution in the UK will be material. The expansion will free up the time of its underwriting teams to focus their expertise on higher-value activity such as complex case underwriting, portfolio underwriting, broker development, broker engagement, product innovation, and capability and appetite expansion.
“Our underwriters will be able to dedicate more time and more resources into understanding exactly what it is that each of our brokers want and need from CFC in order to be successful, and to achieve our mutual growth aspirations,” he said. “CFC remains a business committed to bringing high-quality products to market in a quick and simple way.
“Conversely, however, we’re a business of increasing scale and complexity. And within that framework, it becomes more and more difficult over time to consistently deliver ease of access, speed of response, and simplicity of trading without innovation and without evolution. Connect in this context is a critical strategic component that will not only enable CFC to continue to grow at pace, but most importantly, will empower CFC to continue to look and feel like the company you’ve worked with and supported for over 20 years.”
CFC is “incredibly proud” of what Connect can do today, McNamara said, and it’s also “incredibly excited” about what Connect will be able to do in the future and what this will mean for CFC’s brokers as the company continues the expansion of its digital distribution in the UK. In terms of next steps, he pointed to the US where Connect is now live across CFC’s cyber, E&O and technology insurance products, with management liability due to be launched shortly. Without confirming any specific order, he expects these will be the first products to also launch in the UK, alongside the existing proposition within cyber.
Adding to this, Pat Brice, distribution director at CFC, noted that CFC is also looking to rollout the Connect proposition across its terrorism insurance offering in the imminent future, along with a few other bespoke products. He said he expects that these will likely start to launch “thick and fast” on the solid foundation laid by CFC’s long-standing emphasis on product development activity.
“We’ve had a huge amount of development activity in the background over the last four or five years to get to a point where all of these products are ready to trade,” he said. “…It’s not actually that simple to get stuff on to a digital platform when you’ve been trading it conventionally for a long time. You have to really start standardising the wording and then standardising the way that you assess the risk to get it to a point where it’s actually valuable for the brokers and clients.
“[…] But all of the underwriting teams and the product teams at CFC have been doing a huge amount of work over the last three-five years to get every volume product that we do ready for that, which means they’re all stacked up now. And it’s a question of our development capability to get them on to the platform. So, the next 12-18 months are going to be quite exciting.”
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