Today ambitious insurers are building customer experience as a way to differentiate themselves, expanding products and partnering across an ever-expanding ecosystem to bring new value to customers’ lives.
They’re embedding insurance processes into our payment transactions to cover expensive purchases, and into our cars to help us avoid risk while driving. Because the competitive landscape will be dictated by those that aim high and ultimately deliver on their visions of the future, ambition is going to be vital during insurance’s next stage of evolution.
Introducing: The Ambitious Insurer Awards
To recognise and celebrate the industry’s most ambitious and innovative initiatives, EIS partnered with Insurtech Insights to launch The Ambitious Insurer Awards, with the first awards ceremony happening at ITI Europe 2023.
The awards weren’t about narrow line of business categories or being constrained by how insurers operate today; they were about celebrating insurers pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. We wanted to recognize insurers using innovative thinking and modern technology to re-imagine how insurance works.
With over 150 submissions, 19 finalists, and 13 selected to present their case in front of panelists, it was fantastic to see. Plus, with one winner announced at the end of the day, it was high exposure and high stakes for those who made the cut.
The True Purpose of Insurance
These awards reminded us of something really important: Ultimately, insurance enables us to do things we wouldn’t otherwise be able to due to financial risk. Insurance frees people, businesses, and societies to go about their daily business, which is something that’s easy to forget in the weeds of complex business models, administration, cost structures, and constraining legacy technology.
While it’s fair to say the sector has been caught behind in recent tech transformations, the potential to really embrace the true purpose of insurance has never been higher… and we saw it in all 13 submissions presented during The Ambitious Insurer Awards. We heard from Nationwide, Aviva, Allianz Re, esure, ERGO, Allianz SE, Parametric, Generali, Smile Insurance, Gard AS, Livewell Asia, and Zoundream and HITS.
Their stories were full of ambition, and the stuff insurance dreams are made of.
There was a travel Insurance venture, where finding a medical service or outcome was seamless and removed the need for a claims process. There were references to large partner ecosystems allowing brokers to shape propositions and deliver the right outcomes to their customers. There was a Swiss startup that created an AI application to analyze baby cries to identify early signs of health problems and what a baby wants using machine learning and a bank of data.
These were stories of truly incredible customer experiences, innovation, and totally new business models.
Ok, But… Who Won?
The winner showed incredible pioneering work providing weather insurance for cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire. It was ambitious, yes, but also a heart-warming story that spoke to what insurance is all about.
This winning initiative by Allianz Re and OKO’s leverages technology and data to ensure it meets the needs of Côte d’Ivoire’s rural farming communities by keeping tabs on elements like soil moisture and evapotranspiration.
In addition, OKO uses novel data science to design index insurance products that are improved every year through fine-tuning. The products leverage mobile wallets, making them accessible to all farmers remotely and digitally. This is what insurance is all about, and a great example of ambition driving an insurer to success, and making humanity better in the process.
The Ambitious Business Models of Tomorrow
Because technology and data are at the heart of all of today’s insurance transformations, harnessing them to make changes can, in fact, sometimes be fairly straightforward. Oftentimes, however, it requires better business and core technology architecture to make it happen, which is why the ambitious insurer stories are so inspiring.
In this next stage of the insurance industry’s evolution, ambitious insurers will continue to make our lives better. They’ll adopt the ecosystem model that is driving other industries to thrive, and they’ll reshape the competitive landscape in the process.
To get your own ambitious juices flowing, check out The Ambitious Insurer’s Guide to New Business Models. It’ll help guide the way on what you need to do to address the widening protection gap, support rising customer expectations, and how to beat your competition to the market.
