Today Jason Hammond, CEO Asia at QBE, Gurindar Singh, Head of Insurance Services, APAC at AWS and Arijit Chakraborty, Managing Director APAC at Cover Genius joined us to talk about the future of distribution in the APAC region.
We discussed collaborating with agents, digitising the customer experience and the future of embedded insurance.
Here’s what we learnt:
Insurance products are still relationship driven – insurers should facilitate this. Jason Hammond says that the most successful Chief Agency Officers will be those who understand the importance of cultivating strong agency relationships through great product design. Insurers should target clearer user experiences to enable agents to sell their more complex products – it is harder to be undercut when your product is supported by a network of agents trusted by consumers.
The pandemic has increased the pace of innovation. This market has stood firmer than most with in-person agent sales, and the pandemic has accelerated a shift away from this model. For context, 96% of frontline distributors in India are using digital channels. In this new remote landscape, insurers should embrace telesales, e-signatures and other technologies to remove barriers of entry into a collaborative insurance marketplace.
The future is in engaging with the consumer journey. Gurindar Singh points to a customer base that is increasingly influenced by the customer experiences they get outside of the insurance world. Expectations are high, and insurers need to impress by seamlessly connecting their products to an API ecosystem with third party providers.
Embedded insurance is exploding. Arijit Chakraborty says that embedding insurance products within third party e-commerce, retail and ride-sharing apps is key to engaging customers. This paradigm shift may not be immediate, but enabling customers to have bespoke, real-time experiences might well shift the balance of being sold insurance to actively buying insurance.
–
Matt Kenyon is a content producer at Insurtech Insights.
Join 160,000 members of the insurtech community by signing up for our newsletter here.
You can watch the whole webinar on demand here, and take a look at our upcoming webinars here.
