What if a computer program could analyse all the data about your business as a broker, and then come back and tell you where the gaps are? How to grow your book, how to get more business, how to see where your clients should be covered where they may not already be.
Well, Stubben Edge Group believes it has such a program. The organisation created a piece of insurtech that does all of that - using what a broker already has to help them grow in the market.
Chris Kenning (pictured), managing director of Stubben Edge Group, explained that many brokers have been using the software already to cross-sell and find out what their clients actually need.
“Brokers with niche books of business, how do they end up cross-selling or servicing their customer needs with additional covers?” Kenning asked. “What we’ve developed is an analytics tool which is based on our history of writing lots of different product lines.”
The program, essentially, is able to analyse data and show how valuable another product would be to a client, and the broker, based on the information currently available.
“It allows them to upload their data and be able to assess the value of that book of business for other product lines,” Kenning explained.
“Say if you’ve got caravans, we’ll be able to say what this is worth as a book of property insurance business, on the basis that if you’re in a caravan you’re not in your property. So, does that change the risk because you’re not likely, for example, to burn both [the caravan and the property] down at the same time?”
The program has the potential to help brokers more than they may realise – helping them avoid wasting time and money pursuing lines of business that won’t come off or will be costly with little return.
“There’s some cross-subsidisation. We can say you’ve got a great property book of business, here’s the insurance policy, here is the system and here is how you can cost effectively grow your book of business,” he said.
“But, at the same time, we can say ‘actually this is not a very good property book of business this a very good life book of business.’”
The program, called Lucid UX, came out of wanting to create something that the industry actually needed, not just creating tech for tech’s sake.
“We really wanted to ensure the proposition is tailored around the needs of the market and that we can help brokers provide better products to their clients quicker,” the managing director said.
Kenning believes that although there has been an increase in recent years of people using aggregators to purchase insurance, brokers have a chance to gain back a lot of business.
“The reason I think brokers are going to have a bit of a resurgence in terms of their role in an advisory capacity is the world seems to be creating just as many risks as it seems to be commoditising them,” he said. “I’d probably argue that they’re creating more.
“So, if you if you look at things like cyber insurance - that’s been done for corporates but really on a personal level it’s only just starting to come out. If you look at the political risk element, Brexit has made it a more interesting area for people to look at.”
The key, Kenning explained, is relationships and niches. If brokers have that, combined with information, he thinks they will do well.
“A lot of the brokers who are growing at the moment have specific niches they are good at,” he said. “What the aggregators have done is put a hard monetary value on it - but I think that has given the brokers an edge on knowing who their customers are because they actually talk to them.”
