Insurtech – A Marketer’s Perspective

Gavin Peters, the VP of Marketing at Genasys Technologies shares some thoughts on Insurtech and how the market is developing.

Tony: Insurance has changed significantly over the years, with radical innovations. At the same time, there has also been a lot of change in the technology world.

Do you think that insurance innovation follows technology development or does technology development follow insurance innovation. 

Gavin: So as the VP of marketing at Genasys, and previously a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of another tech company outside of the insurance industry, it has always been my role to look at what the customer needs. So, here at Genasys, I really look at what our customers require from a technology provider, and perhaps more importantly, what their customers are looking for because ultimately we are selling B2B to C software. We have to have a deep knowledge of what end-consumer expect from a modern insurance solution.

So, when I look at it through that lens, it is pretty clear that it is the insurance industry following the customers who are following the technology. Innovation is coming as a response to a change in expectations, which as occurred because of the kind of technology that is out there in everyday life. Not through insurance, but just through the digitisation of our world, whether that is through entertainment, purchasing, retail, healthcare or whatever. Mobile connectivity and data, amongst others, have changed the customer landscape, whether you are doing B2C or B2B. People just expect a different kind of solution to what they might have wanted even 10 years ago.

Expectations of what a transaction or a relationship with an organization of any field should look like has changed fundamentally. They expect “always-on”, seamless digital experiences with everything they do, and therefore insurers must react to that. 

Tony: From a marketing perspective then, where you look at things in terms of the client behaviour and what they need, et cetera, what do you see over the next decade in this landscape?

Gavin: Well maybe the “hype” in a formal sense around insurtech is now fading, but only because it is becoming the norm. We call it Insurtech at Genasys because it helps describe what we do to the insurance industry, and it does describe that the solution we provide is quite different to what insurance has been used to in the past. But you do not order something online from a shop and call that Retailtech. You just call it retail. It is just what it should be. 

So, how will it change in the next 10 years? I would say a rapid move towards the cloud for service providers and insurers, making sure that everything is fit for the modern world – but I say “rapid” by insurance standards! I see it as an evolution rather than sudden transformation, because the insurance industry changes slowly, understandably so because it is very complex. There are a lot of compliance and legacy issues built into the industry. 

Relative to this industry, however, there is a rapid shift now toward digitization because there are still a lot of players who have started making the move but have not got to where they need to get to.

Once that has become the norm then you will start to see how we can really use it. And that means how do insurers share data with a wider eco-system to create new ways of adding value? How do they really do things like personalization? For example, I do not see personalization in the same way that you would see in retail or other industries, but in a very specific way: such as how do you provide true multi-channel services, and make them highly relevant to the person buying them, without adding friction. 

I think then it will start to move on from a basic transactional relationship to more risk management and risk mitigation because that is essentially what customers want; they want to buy peace of mind and reassurance. They do not want to buy a policy that they are actually going to have to claim on. So insurance is a different kind of product experience, and it will move towards solving the real problems people are looking to solve: not making a claim, but reducing their risk.

But we are some way off from where it can get to. First thing is that, in the next 10 years, people will have to get the modern infrastructure in place.

Tony: There is a big shift around here in South African market, especially the broking environment, to risk management as the focus rather than providing insurance. The insurance is there to back up, but you provide risk management, of which insurance is an essential part. 

Gavin: Tech enables that in certain ways because obviously there is more information available. We all know about the internet things and tracking devices, for example.

That shift can also help manage premiums and how much you pay while also lowering the risk of things happening, which is what the customer is really looking for. It is an interesting concept when you think about what you are buying – there are few industries where you buy a product that you never want to use. So that is not really a very marketable product, but something that lowers their risk is. 

When you are actually mitigating risks you open up ways to add real customer value to that relationship. That’s going to be a huge shift in the way the industry perceives what an “insurance” company is for.