Following the launch of Qlaims Insurance’s new advocacy service for commercial insurance brokers, chief development officer of Qlaims Insurance, Mike Keating (pictured), took the opportunity to discuss the strategy and delivery of the claims support portal with Insurance Business.
Circumventing the normal procedure following a claim that sees an insurer appoint a loss adjuster, this product delivers a claims advocacy service to brokers and their clients and funds a professional claims preparation and negotiation service for valid property claims of more than £5,000.
“We’re acting very much as a claims advocate for the client, for the insurer and for the broker,” Keating said.
The key benefit, as Keating sees it, is its capacity for the claim to be handled quickly, preventing the insurer from incurring additional interim payments and helping the customer get their business back on track, without having to worry about getting the claim sorted.
This latter benefit has become essential, Keating outlined.
“In the UK… customers are demanding that their claims are handled in a far better way now,” he said. “It’s just the next step in the evolution of technology and how our claims are handled.”
Citing a survey carried out this year, Keating outlined how almost 60% of customers are unhappy with the way that insurance claims are settled. Having worked for large insurance companies himself he believes it is not the case that insurers aren’t doing everything they can to try and help customers in their claims – rather the environment of how customers want their claims handled is changing very quickly.
With support from sister company, QlaimsTech, the new claims service offered by Qlaims Insurance will see loss adjusters deploying video streaming technology to assess and support claims, and will enable brokers to view the live progress of the claim 24/7. This technology, Keating believes, provides brokers with the key to succeeding in a competitive SME market
“Unless [the brokers] are operating in a niche field of SME business…brokers who are very good at what they do are looking to find a point of differentiation,” he outlined.
Everything’s instantaneous now, he said, so why would you not move the claims settling process into the tech space? He believes that in the next two or three years this video streaming service will be seen as standard throughout the sector.
This fusion of a more traditional product with state-of-the-art technology offers the flexibility which, Keating said, MGAs bring to the insurance sector. The agility of the MGA model, according to Keating, is what allows it to adopt new technologies far quicker than insurers traditionally can and this is just one of the reasons why MGAs continue to grow and evolve.
Now Keating is keen on creating a number of strategic partnerships with key brokers. With some of these conversations already underway, Keating stated his ambition is to keep talking to relevant brokers in an effort to continuously shape the product to meet their needs.
“It’s that constant communication in terms of understanding the… broker’s and customer’s needs and how we can be flexible in our proposition to meet those needs,” he said. “It’s all about transparency, communication and a forensic understand of each other’s business requirements, and how we can match them.”
