In the second part of the Great Insurtech Debate, held at The Steelyard, London on 30th October, Instech London brought back together industry leaders for the second part of the evening to debate who will own the future of insurance. Speakers included Novidea, BoughtByMany, Trov, Zego, Zurich, EOS Ventures, InsurTech Gateway, AXA ventures, KPMG and Deloitte. Many thanks to our sponsors for the night, SAS and Novidea.
Listen here to InsTech London podcast 14. It is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and Podbean.
Listen to podcast 13 for the first part of the debate – “Is the insurance industry failing its customers?”
………………………………………………………………………………………
Transcript for this podcast
00:06 Robin Merttens: Welcome back, we’re back for part two of our monthly session at the Steel Yard, under Cannon Street in the city of London.
00:15 RM: Part two was, “Who will own the future of insurance?” And we gave our panel several topics to choose from. Will it be the incumbents, will it be insurtech, will it be bigtech, will it be ecosystems, will it be the brokers, will it be others? And now I’m going to hand it over to the speakers, and they’re going to give you their views.
00:37 Paul: Hello again. Who will own the future of insurance? Dyson.
00:50 Paul: Oh no, sorry, got my lines wrong. Let’s think first of all about other industries, and who has owned them. So the Hoover industry, while Hoover was busy doing disastrous promotional campaigns and choosing what different colours they can make a vacuum cleaner, Dyson was completely reimagining how you could build a vacuum cleaner. Let’s pick mobile phones, while Nokia was making them smaller and sleeker, Apple was obviously coming up with a smartphone. And then if we think about the airline industry, it wasn’t changing at all with all of the traditional airlines, flight carriers doing the same thing, Southwest Airline completely rethinks how to run an airline company and invents the low-cost airline.
01:39 Paul: So the question is, all of these companies have challenged the deeply held assumptions. Who is really doing that in insurance? It’s ripe for disruption. We all know that. But who is actually challenging the assumptions. The incumbents, at the moment, are tweaking at the edges. The insurtechs are nibbling. So maybe it is Dyson. So let’s just take you through a bit of the logic that we’ve been working on for a lot of this. So we’ve done a little work in terms of thinking about the mega trends, what’s going on with that. Everyone will be familiar with that sort of thing, and then the seven disruptive forces that we see in insurance.
02:19 Paul: So firstly, what we’re seeing with excess capacity and the fact that alternative capital is now $100 billion. So capital isn’t a huge part of the core bit of this, but you have got to be using all of that. Distribution, we’ll be talking about brokers already, to what extent are aggregators really making inroads, for example, in commercial insurance? And it is starting to happen, so medium-sized companies – two years ago only 4% of medium-sized enterprises were buying insurance through aggregators, it’s now jumped up to 16%. So we’re starting to see some progress. Thirdly, emerging risks, and this is one of my biggest gripes on the previous debate, the failing customers. So cyber insurance is one of the best parts of insurance now, it’s starting to motor, $4 billion of insurance has been written and that should rise to something like 22 billion by 2024. There is a trillion dollars of risk in cyber at the moment, so it’s a drop in the ocean in terms of what the insurance industry is really solving for. The emerging risks of business interruption, reputational damage, there’s huge white space there.
03:39 Paul: In terms of products to solutions, I’m sure everyone is going to talk about prevention to response, that’s a huge drive, and collaboration, data analytics, and then my favourite one, holding us all back at the moment is the fact that business models are changing far quicker than operating models. Everyone’s tied down by their legacy systems, their processes, and yes, their people. So with those disruptive forces, we’re seeing everyone try and challenge them, we’re seeing what we’re calling battle grounds, where actually there’s blurring of the lines between the traditional six categories that you’ve been given. Brokers are underwriting, underwriters are trying to get into distribution, re-insurers are moving up the chain, you’ve even got ILSs coming up to work with MGAs to try and get into the distribution game. So there’s confusion all over the place. So I think we’ve got to move beyond the current strap lines.
04:33 Paul: And when we think about those battle grounds, ultimately driving to some of the conclusion in the interest of time, it’s that those who are orchestrating the solution of the customers’ need, you’re going to be the answer. So in those examples that I started off with, it was those companies that the customers turn in to, even if it’s all outsourced at the backend and this response was the problem for the solution. In insurance, the brokers seem reticent to move back up the chain, as do price comparison websites at the moment, but those companies who can tie it all together, be for example like someone like Dell who’s owned PC manufacturing for a decade, Vanguard in asset management, the customer sees them as the answer that, even if at the backend there’s a whole orchestration element to provide.
05:31 Paul: I think I’ll stop there in the interest of time, but the answer to the question is, those who own the customer. At the moment, people aren’t being bold enough, any of the people on the line, I think it’s “who has got the biggest will?”, will win. I think if I was to put on the spot, we’re going to see it bitten in different pieces. Let’s pick car insurance, for example, we’re going to see someone like Tesla, they’re just going to wrap insurance into their service offering, insurance is just going to be white-labelled at the backend. So if I were to place a bet, I’d say the non-traditional players are going to start eating away at bits of insurance.
06:08 RM: Paul, thank you very much.
06:13 Robin Merttens: We’ve got a couple of new faces in the second half. Up next is Ben Potts who is the managing director of Novidea and our sponsor today. Ben, come and give us your view.
06:25 Ben Potts: Okay, so it’s been interesting facing the first session, just sitting there listening around everyone’s views on customers and is the insurer getting the right customer. It all comes down to exceeding expectations, so who’s going to own the future of insurance? And to me, all of the different stakeholders that Robin mentioned, it’s all of them. It’s not the insurer, we talked there around distance mediation of the distribution chain and it’s every single one of those stakeholders has a place to play, and it’s how they do that. To me, it’s how they’re exceeding expectations of the customer, the businesses of the future who are exceeding expectations, who are making themselves more accessible to do business with, who are just giving experience, not just to their customers, but partners and to their own employees as well. It’s those guys that are going to be successful.
07:24 BP: I’m a technology guy, it’s an instech room. So, I’m going to pin my thoughts and it’s around big technology when as a business, we’re not actually a big technology provider. But big technology to me is where we look at existing place where all insurers come and brokers, anyone across the spectrum, it’s the guys just mentioned. They look at a world through deep functional needs, it’s a complex business. So the complex business we’re living in, they look at a need for complexity. And through that, generally it’s a case of, “Do I build technology or do I go and buy technology from an existing proprietary vendor?” And you do that and you look at the customer questions and ask is it meeting the needs of expectations of our industry? And I don’t think it is. Our customers are talking about the Internet of Things, it’s deep analytics, it’s wanting to be able to access things everywhere, it’s being accessible. And the technologies that we use within our industry don’t provide that.
08:41 BP: And then you look at other industries, in our marketplace, away from our marketplace. Gartner did a great Magic Quadrant review of the cloud place providers where we’re told as an industry that we need to be. And if you look at those, that’s a marketplace that’s gone from 2014 in the Gartner report where there was lots of visionaries, not very many leaders within that space. And in four years, there’s twice the number of – they were visionaries – now leaders and very few visionaries. And what’s happening is the rest of the world is kind of realising that to meet your expectations of your customers, technology has to move at a pace to do that and provide those things.
09:23 BP: And when you look at those big cloud providers, the Salesforce, the Oracles, all of those guys, the proprietary software that we sit on, the stuff we build ourselves on low budgets, it isn’t going to compete with the hundreds of millions of dollars that those guys are spending, those huge ecosystems of applications that allow you to do, your customers to do anything they want to do because you are generally connected, you’re generally using machine learning, you’re not just doing little pockets of things. And we just can’t compete with that in the way that we deploy and use technology across our business.
09:58 BP: So it is a technology response, but for me, the businesses that are going to be the future of insurance are going to be the ones that take that big technology and stop building stuff, stop going to small software houses and trying to use stuff that’s proprietary. They look at the Salesforce platforms, the Oracles, those sorts of big sort of enterprise applications and services truly on the cloud, but they embed that deep insurance knowledge that they know most industries, so effective with our customers, that knowledge that we know and all have, it’s embedding into that big technology. And if you do that, then you’ve got the opportunity to meet the expectations of your customers, you’ve got to exceed them, you have the ability to be more accessible, and if you’re doing those things wherever you are in that distribution chain that was just described earlier, you will be the future of insurance. Okay.
10:49 RM: Is that a vote for bigtech?
10:51 BP: Yes.
10:51 RM: Good man, thank you.
11:00 RM: I feel that we need someone to defend our industry. Arslan, who’s going to own your job in the next few years?
11:07 Arslan: I managed to find a bullet proof vest during the break, so I feel a lot more confident now, but who’s going to own the insurance industry in the future? I think it’ll be the provider or the providers that really fundamentally change the definition of insurance. Today, we still think of insurance as very siloed. Even up here, we’re talking about home insurance, car insuranc. So if you start taking these different lenses what about commercial insurance, what about the Lloyd’s market, what about life insurance, what about pensions? So it keeps going on and on and on. I think the real shift that needs to happen is what about ‘before insurance’ and what about ‘after insurance’?
11:45 Arslan: So how do we, as an insurance industry, help people not face that risk in the first place? How do we help them manage that risk, to begin with, and what are we doing after the event? If that event still seems to happen, what do we do afterwards? And so let’s take an individual’s example. We’ve talked a lot about personal lines and consumer business. The insurance policy I want, I don’t even want five or six different policies, I want one. I don’t care if I’m travelling on a plane or on a train or in a car, or on a bike, or on a motorcycle, I just want to be covered and whoever solves that problem is going to be the winner. That may be bigtech, that may be an insurance company, that may be an InsurTech. One thing I’m sure of, though, is that a lot of people in this ecosystem, in the insurance and insurtech ecosystem, we’re still looking at individual problems in a very silo-driven world.
12:38 Arslan: And I think we need to zoom out and start looking at the problem from end to end from what a consumer really wants. I think with a lot of the insurtechs and so on, once you start hitting scale, you’ll have the same problems that all the incumbents have. We’ve seen that time and time again, you can say that about Google, you can say that about Amazon, about…there’s n number of examples. So instead of trying to battle on within these silos, let’s try to step away and try to solve the problem on a bigger picture of “how do we prevent risk to begin with” and if it still does happen, I’m sure the actuaries in here will have an opinion about this, that things do still happen, what do we do after that claim? And whoever solves that is going to be the winner. Thank you.
13:21 RM: Thank you very much, Arslan.
13:23 Arslan: Thank you.
13:27 RM: I feel we should have an insurtech perspective again. Ed, come on, do your thing.
13:34 Ed: Thank you folks, interesting debate, and earlier was very interesting. So who’s going to win the future of insurance? I think Robin is probably not going to like this, but I think there could be multiple winners and it depends on the vertical. So Arslan talks about protection rather than insurance or preventing the need for insurance and the after-life of insurance. We look at it slightly differently and we think about the sort of people that Trov could work with in the future, and we define it around core insurance businesses that their core business is insurance, how do they win the future? We believe they win the future by collaborating with insurtechs, with big data owners. There’s a core of businesses around the world, many of them are very, very new, that need innovative insurance to do business, so the Ubers of this world, the Airbnbs, they can win in this world of insurance in the future if they innovate the product and make it very personalised. And then you’ve got insurance distributors or big data owners. So in that side of the world where you’ve got the Amazons and the Facebooks and the eBays, we believe they have a real role to play in future of insurance if they decide that they really want to, but they can’t do it on their own.
14:55 Ed: So they’ve got massive data pools, trust, brand scores, but actually if they decide that they want to do insurance, we believe they’ll have to work with the Zurichs of this world, the insurtechs of this world. So we define it slightly differently that there maybe isn’t one winner in the future of insurance, it’s very relevant for the type of business so you can then rule that across commercial lines as well. So there can be multiple winners or multiple ‘future of insurance’, but we believe at Trov that actually the innovation across all markets is one of the most important things because as the millennial generation grows up and they get more and more powerful in our industries, then the need for innovation around digital experiences will come to the forefront.
15:44 Ed: So to answer the question, the future we think is the ecosystem and it’s many of the players that want to play in it including brokers, including insurance companies, insurtechs. They can all play a role in it, but it has to be working as Arslan said earlier collaboratively, defining what the future of it looks like.
16:06 RM: Thank you very much.
16:11 RM: So we have another new face, Jannat Shah Rajan from AXA Ventures. She’s busy doing deals so Jannat, who owns the future of insurance?
16:26 Jannat Shah Rajan: Thank you. So who will own the future of insurance? For those who don’t know me, I enjoy a very good relationship with AXA, but for the purpose of this conversation, I’m going to describe myself as an industry commentator. I think that’s more fair. So what’s to say to the world now? Incumbents are winning now, they already have the proverbial full-stack that insurtechs aspire to have or that InsurTech 1.0 aspire to have, and quite frankly, some insurtechs have been and gone, not naming any names. What’s clear is that incumbents can’t be replaced overnight. We’ve seen this banking wave of neobanks, that was what FinTech was defined to be, and it isn’t as easy in insurance as it was in banking or as simple, to be a disruptor.
17:15 JR: Incumbents have taken a number of years to get to these behemoth balance sheets and there exists a regulatory moat too and by this I mean the solvency capital that they’ve acquired, the products that they have, the regulation around it, it is hard to just displace that overnight. Incumbents though also have a responsibility towards innovation and the overall advancement of the industry which is what we’re talking about, the future of insurance. Incumbents aren’t perfect and while they still have the insurance talent, it’s probably challenging to actually recruit the technical talent, but entrepreneurial mindset is a different matter and this still exists in the industry today.
17:58 JR: I’m not defending incumbents entirely. Incumbents still have to overcome a few challenges to become really future proof. Legacy systems, excuse or a reason? Or an opportunity, for those of you who are keen, keen disruptors? Defining own innovation strategies, and by this I mean we see a lot of innovation that happens or innovation prongs that certain businesses or tier one insurers have, we will see that post occasionally in Coverager which kind of makes us think, “Oh, is that really a smart strategic move?” And also a side point, it’s quite interesting that our industry has a tabloid blog. If anybody’s ever read Coverager, I don’t know how widely read it is, I certainly read it almost every day. It does read as a tabloid and it’s quite fascinating that our industry kind of commands that kind of interest, but I digress.
18:52 JR: And lastly, and I don’t know if I’m exactly allowed to say this, being more collaborative. We see a lot of collaboration on the tech side of things, but we don’t actually see it as much on the incumbent side. You don’t really see tier one insurers working with one another. So they should really offer sound boxes for more startup or tech initiatives and also dialogue with other industry peers as well. I think these are some of the ingredients that’ll really push incumbents more into the future of insurance as well. But now I’m going to ask you some reflective questions on, is it the disruptors, is it the incumbents? Do insurtechs really replace or displace the entire value chain or are they best of breed solutions that pick on particular points in the value chain, or solve a particular problem? Has anyone really cracked what customers actually want? Is it just a vanity sensation that we think that customers care this much about their insurance policy in the first place?
19:55 JR: So I’ll give you my sense on it. The future of insurance won’t be insurtechs at the expensive of incumbents nor will it be incumbents alone. In my opinion, incumbents will continue to be the bedrock of the market, perhaps they will be a platform for innovators to underwrite and distribute their products. Customers will ultimately dictate whether or not their brand value will mean anything but the infrastructural, operational dominance of incumbents means that they will be the future of insurance. One last question. Is insurtech a response to exploiting efficiency gains in the insurance industry or borne out of genuine customer desire and need? You’re in this room as an insurance industry participant, executive, disruptor or enthusiast. From where I stand and I opened with this, I’m more of an industry commentator. Ultimately, it’s not these hats that we wear that decide, it’s the customer, and the customer would probably just settle for a status quo. Plus a little digitisation and some better pricing, but ultimately we’re all customers as well, aren’t we?
21:04 RM: Thank you, Jannat. Great.
21:09 RM: You going to come and wind us up again?
21:12 Nigel: So the unpopular question again or the unpopular vote. So the question this time, “who will own the future of insurance?” The answer from my perspective is “other”. And when I say “other” I mean, customers. So hear me out on this one. If we think anyone else other than the customer is going to win, God help us. We are stuck in a race to drive better products, more efficient, faster widgets that get compared, on the comparison side and we’re racing to zero because everyone thinks we’re all the same. So, wowzers we’ve just pissed off our entire customer base and put them into a mix that everyone compares the same things together. That is not the right answer. It is a race to zero in my opinion. And if you’re facing that race, then it’s down to who is the most efficient manufacturer. And then you can ask the question, “Is it us as an insurance organisation, is it big tech, is it ecosystem, is it collaboration?”
22:14 Nigel: How many of you…and you don’t need to answer but just have a think…have switched based on a bad experience, or on price? You, the customer, still wins. You get the right to vote and choose to do so with your feet. In the words of the great Dirty Harry, “Go ahead punk, make my day”
22:40 Nigel: But you get what I mean, right? We’ve all got it, we’ve wrote the letter through, well that’s just rubbish. Straight on to a site and off again straight away. We have full control. I’ve lost you all completely, haven’t I? Answer; “other”. Understanding the needs. And you mentioned it a minute ago. Understanding the needs of your clients, or customer, number one, is critical. Number two, understanding their unmet needs and working out what they actually need and want, rather than putting them into a box and going, “Guess what, let’s compare more of the same, which is to put more up there,” is completely important to me. It’s their asset. What matters most? Me as an asset? My car? My thing I’m insuring? My time? My inconvenience? What bit as an insurance organisation can we wrap around the things that matter to take away that pain? Find your niche. Paul mentioned earlier, USAA, great example for anyone who’s not looked into them. Look at what they’re doing, fantastic example. Another one I came across recently was Hagerty Insurance. Hagerty are classic car specialists that happen to sell insurance, but they’re the biggest insurance provider of all for classic cars.
23:49 Nigel: They send out 87 communications to their clients each year. 87! Jesus, what are they doing? And customers want them, they want to engage. Go look at them, they’re really, really interesting. 52 of those of course are weekly newsletters, but there’s lots more insight into those. Bought by Many, another great example, find your niche. 340+ groups, pet insurance, someone with ailments, whatever else. They found ways to work out what matters to people and start to take away the pain. So customers win time and time again. You’ve all heard, Bezos, I’ll get the quote right this time, “Your margin is my opportunity.” What does that mean in our world? Have a think about that time and time again.
24:31 Nigel: I’m pleased to say I guess that insurtechs as we all know in this room are unencumbered by legacy. It is our greatest gift, to every single incumbent carrier. We are unencumbered by legacy, we can move at speed and we haven’t got the governments and process to run through. It doesn’t mean to say it’s impossible, but the unbundling race is almost over in banking, and the re-bundling race is now started. What does that mean? I no longer want 30 apps to do 45 of the things on my phone, we’ll want convenience. How does that then translate back into the insurtech world going forward?
25:10 Nigel: I’ll finish on a few points. We have to get better as communicators. Customers don’t understand the things that we engage with them on. We say 99% per the earlier debate because people don’t trust us. How do you re-instil those things in the first place? We have to speak English. I want to ask the room because it’s embarrassing when people ask people to do it. No one reads the bloody policies, very few people read the policies, of course in a room of insurance people, probably less in this room than anywhere else. But they don’t read them because they just don’t make sense, they’re not written in plain English. Look at the efforts from the folks at Lemonade and stuff like that.
25:47 Nigel: The next one, we go to school and learn trigonometry, because, sin, tan, and we forget it really quickly. It’s not relevant to our every day lives going forward, most people’s everyday lives going forwards. We don’t teach kids about bank accounts, we don’t teach kids about the value of insurance and what it actually does for them. A survey I did years ago looked at things like, people that made claims called up and one in four of people that made a claim didn’t know what an excess was. How is that even possible? You bought a product, you’ve been through all the checks, and yet you still don’t know what an excess is, number one. Number two, I think it was like 50% of the people would have given up a blood sample, or a urine sample, they’re literally taking a piss for a lower premium. It is a really sad state of affairs when it gets to that level. I’ll finish on this one thing, it feels to me that we have sometimes lost the understanding of our value and what it means to the customer, but as an insurance organisation, we’ve not lost our values. The ultimate winner here is the customer.
26:46 RM: Okay, Nigel. Luisa, it seems a bit cosy, Bought by Many, already got the nice name – check. Your turn.
27:01 Luisa: I always come after you and I’m not sure it’s a good thing. So who will own the future of insurance? My view is that the future of insurance will be owned by the customer, so it will be dictated by the customer. And in the next few years, we’ll see quite a lot of change in the role of the different players in the industry. So let’s start with the market, especially as P&C insurance is lagging economic growth. If we look at the premium as a percentage of GDP, that is declining. And that’s the same trend across all lines; auto, liability, property, specialty, and both in mature market and in developing market. So it’s not the market that is actually shrinking, but it’s not growing as fast as the economy is growing.
27:58 Luisa: The second thing is that technology has now reached a tipping point. There are now some proven technologies with an application that can reduce the insurance risk. I think a number of people have already mentioned before, all the things like Internet of Things and the risk prevention and everything that can be done in that space. The nature of risk is also evolving particularly in the commercial insurance space, with a shift from insuring tangible objects and tangible assets, like factories and equipment, to intangible assets, like IP, brand, reputation. And I think a number of people have mentioned cyber insurance before, that actually crosses the boundaries of the existing policies and requires a broader solution in terms of risk management than just an insurance policy.
28:58 Luisa: So what does that mean for the players? I think the critical skills that are going to be needed in the future are different from what is needed today. And at the moment, one of the critical skills is really the risk selection and the underwriting, the technical and underwriting skills. Well in the future, I think the ability to provide a comprehensive service of package together with a solution that includes the insurance and the cover of the risk, but it’s much broader. It comes before the claim on risk prevention or the claim experience itself, but the whole customer experience from the beginning to an end. And it needs to be a superior customer experience. So going back to the point that we had before, the insurance industry is just not delivering on customer experience, it cannot be the last in the list of the 14 industries.
29:56 Luisa: So there will be a shift I think from the insurance company incumbents that, at the moment are doing everything and they’re doing everything themselves, to alternative models. And what those models will be, it’s hard to predict, but it would definitely be a combination of different players, both from within and outside the industry. And my guess is that it will be a different solution for different classes of business or different type of risk. The role that each player will have in the future – and with the players I include the incumbents, the brokers of the insurance company, the brokers and the reinsurer and the insurtech – will really depend on who embraces these changes faster, fastest and in the most efficient way.
30:56 Luisa: I think it will all come down to “will the insurance industry still exist as an industry?” So clearly, if we can all work together and see and deliver on the customer experience, the answer will be yes. And the role different players have will be influenced by what the different customers experience. But there is a scenario where insurance will just be an add-on to other industries, to other services, and it will not actually exist as an industry itself. So clearly, and I’m not advocating for that scenario, but I think we need to consider that is a possibility.
31:39 RM: Done. Thank you very much, Luisa. Couldn’t we put ‘no-one’ at the top of the list. Who’s going to own the future of insurance? No-one. That’s worth raising. Thank you. Karl, do you want to come on?
31:55 Karl: I’ll be quite brief because a lot has been said. The way we think about owning insurance is that it’s going to be pretty diversified. We’re excited about that because there are a lot of touch points that are going to create value. We think that there’s a trio of factors. You know your customer, you know your risk and you know your cost. You know your customer, it’s the incumbents, it’s the Amazons, it’s the car manufacturers, it’s the product providers. We think that a lot of B2C is going to shift into B2B and B2B2C. And ultimately, the one who has the relationship with the customer is ultimately going to have a huge added value in insurance.
32:34 Karl: Know your risk, I’m hugely excited by that opportunity, because we’re touching upon the whole change in the risk pricing, i.e. what is the actuarial industry of tomorrow going to look like? We have very little doubt that there’s going to be a lot of new correlations, a lot of new data, a lot of new health parameters, a lot of all kinds of new data, which is going to emerge. And the ones who can create correlation between understanding the new data and the claims history, is going to be a big winner. There’s a lot happening, but frankly a lot of the correlation is not yet proven. Probably some of the biggest changes which we would expect to happen are going to be in the life insurance and the health insurance industry. We think that health insurance and life insurance is going to have a strong convergence, which is going to be very difficult to disassociate going forward. There, again, know your risk in terms of how to price it, there are an enormous number of players who are going to participate in this winning equation.
33:37 Karl: And then thirdly, know your cost, be smart in processes, reduce costs, cooperate, scale up. Why is the insurance industry having to have 550 processing centres across one country, across one continent? There are going to be enormous consolidation opportunities, groupings of insurance back offices and so forth. Ultimately, it will be an interesting nucleus of different players who are going to emerge out of that. I think the incumbents are going to stay important players but are going to lose in their relevance. When you think of what the car industry’s going to look like, probably most of the car insurance industry, car insurance is going to be sold through car manufacturers and so forth. So, an exciting place to be and to invest. Thanks.
34:33 RM: Thank you, Karl. Stephen, and then I think that’s it. Yes, you’re last up. Go for it. Yes, go on, entertain us.
34:46 Stephen: There’s no mic to drop – that’s why I wanted to be last up! It’s interesting. Two words in the question, “Who owns the future of insurance?” is “owning” and “future”. And I think we’ve been playing around both of these words quite a lot this evening. When I think about what I was doing in 1995, I’d recently graduated and I was thinking about my next job while Jeff Bezos borrowed $250,000 from his mom and dad, and set up a bookstore in his garage, and now we wonder whether he’s going to rule and take over this industry. And that was 1995..? Your maths is better than mine. If we roll that kind of timescale forward, your maths is better than mine, but something around 2030..?Any one of you in the room, or any person I might meet that walks into our incubator and says, “I’ve got an idea,” and asks for $250,000 or the equivalent, maybe has the potential to take over the future of this industry, just like Jeff Bezos did. He didn’t make profit for five years, he was skinned. And all the definitions of future and owning, he didn’t understand any of them. He was just dealing with the daily challenges of trying to start something and trying to prove he was right. And his idea was far bigger than books when he started, but he knew that’s what he had to do.
36:13 Stephen: I guess my first point is, in order to talk about the future, you maybe should just accept that the future is a little further away than tomorrow’s deadline, tomorrow’s metric, tomorrow’s target in our own sight. And we can look across the board into our recent digital history of all the new leaders and the new owners. We’ve crowned these people, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, visionaries, leaders, entrepreneurs, as if they don’t belong in this debate. They all belong in this debate. And somebody from insurance and insurtech will come forward and these people will exist if we allow them in.
36:54 Stephen: Let’s change the definition of a future. And let’s then change the definition of ownership, because the short term is so bloody defeating. There’s always a negative answer when you look at the short-term. Every startup is not going to hit the numbers of customers that you, as incumbents, are after. And you as people trying to inspire your organisations are never going to get the attention of the people at the top, because your numbers aren’t big enough, your plan’s not big enough, and the risk is too high.
37:21 Stephen: Who owns the future? Maybe it’s a combination of people and I’m not going to use the word “collaboration” ’cause I’m about to break that in half. But there’s something about the power of entrepreneurs to make things start and the power of people who are incumbents to become enablers. Decide which one you want to be. Be an entrepreneur or be an enabler. I don’t think the word “incumbent” should be really used anymore. It’s a negative word. It says short-termist. It says, “I’ve got something to protect.” Let’s say that the insurance industry and the technology industries will just agree to “Let’s just be enablers and let’s look around for people who are going to set a path for really changing the future market.” I want everybody to finish this evening and say, “How can I be an enabler? Do I know an entrepreneur and if not, where the hell are they?” Thank you.
38:10 RM: Jim, thank you. A very good way to finish, very collaborative. The result – ecosystem is a clear winner, which doesn’t surprise me really at 47%. “Other” 30%, big tech 11%, insurers… [chuckle] It’s a bad day out for insurers, 7%. There must be some brokers here. That’s a first. No, there aren’t any. There is one. Yes there, so you voted. How many times did you vote? 7%?! Ahh, it’s an even worse day for insurtech, guys, we are wasting our time, 3%. Anyway, we tried.
38:57 RM: Now I’m very much with the camp, Steve, and I thought you summed it up nicely. Actually, we’re all going to own it because we’re all going to play our part in developing the insurance industry of the future. Will you all join me in thanking these speakers. We had a great range tonight.
39:12 RM: Really good, guys. Thank you to the sponsors, of course, Novidea and SaaS. These things are made by them and wouldn’t happen without them. We really, really appreciate that, and last of all, thank you to all of you. I hope you enjoyed it. We hope to see you again. Thank you.
39:37 RM: Well, I think the message from that was very clear. Ultimately, no one’s going to own the future of insurance other than the customer. The customer will determine our future and it’s the customer you’re going to have to work with. My very great thanks to all these speakers. That was a fabulous evening and I look forward to having you all back here another day. Our next event will be on the 19th of November, we’re going to have a clinic for insurance. We very much hope that many of you will be able to join us there. Look forward to seeing you.