Adaptability

October Edition (looking at September), 2024

From transformative technology to transforming the buying process

It is fair to say that technology vendors all typically share the same frustrations with the procurement approaches of most insurers today.?And I am very sure this is true the other way around as well.

With often antiquated processes asking and framing the same questions we received twenty years ago I think it's worth sharing a vendor PoV. It is, after all, clear to most that the technology purchase process needs to transform as well if it’s to make the most of the transformational potential now available.?

And this is because things have changed fast recently. and what is possible requires a completely different viewpoint of technology driven success in insurance today.

Procurement like insurance therefore needs to be far more adaptive than it is today.

So, Paul Whiskin from our EIS team took a look at how we think it can be improved.

We often ask for feedback from clients, win or lose - delving into what could we have improved on. However, not once in Paul Whiskin’s 40 year career in insurance has a prospect ever asked for feedback about their processes surrounding an RFI (Request for Information) or RFP (Request for Proposal). So it rarely happens the other way around.

"Perhaps they assume they won’t need to fulfill another similar procurement process for a considerable time, or they are confident that their documents and processes are flawless?"?

Instead, soliciting feedback from vendors could greatly enhance their selection process, particularly when considering something as transformative as a piece of software you might operate the full lifecycle of your insurance services on.

This aims to unpack some recommendations for crafting an effective RFI – not necessarily perfect, but one that collects all the crucial data needed to begin the vendor selection process with a reliable benchmark.?

An RFI should not be a comprehensive proposal; it’s merely the initial step towards creating a shortlist of vendors. If the RFI is too brief, it loses its significance; if it’s overly long and detailed, it defeats its purpose. A careful balancing act.

Here are several crucial tips for drafting a robust RFI that should assist you in accurately choosing your next insurance software solution provider:

ONE: Conduct Thorough Research

Even for a relatively simple RFI, some groundwork is necessary.

Whether you’re employing a specialist consultancy to draft your document, or doing it internally, it’s obviously crucial to investigate your potential vendors.?

This involves more than just browsing their websites for a suitable “fit”; it includes examining their clientele – and looking at the outcomes, do they drive meaningfully transformed outcomes? It's important to find out as much as possible about their performance, delivery and overall approach??Often speaking to their clients, your SI or advisory partners and so on.

This relatively straightforward process can save you significant money in the long run.

TWO: Engagement

Engage with your vendors fully - give them time to visit you, allow them to ask open questions and see your current applications and processes live. Making it clear what you’re trying to transform, sharing the business case you’ve so lovingly crafted allows your potential vendors to better align the value of their technologies with the business outcomes you seek.

This will enable them to not only address your questions in a knowledgeable way, but also suggest alternatives that may never have occurred to you. Meaning you will gain far more clarity on the knowledge, skills and expertise of the vendor. After all, they should be sending out their best people, right?

Refrain from compiling all vendor’s questions into a single list and distributing to all. This may save you time and effort initially, but cost you more in the long run. A proactive and knowledgeable vendor may ask you questions that no other vendor had considered because they don’t really understand you, your product, ethos or market.?

You should be selecting based upon ability to deliver the entire solution, not striving to give everyone an equal footing where none existed before.

THREE: Timescales

Focusing more on your vendors and getting the most out of them.?

Paul Whiskin has a story that highlights this. “I once participated in a process that involved over 20 vendors within the insurance supply chain, some of which couldn’t even support the required product lines.”?

He continues. “Being sensible; for an initial RFI, we would expect no more than five companies. This reduces your internal evaluation time and provides focus. If it’s known that the same document has been submitted to a dozen or more vendors, you’re unlikely to receive the same level of attention and detail in the response.”

Consider the response timelines: Paul Whiskin again recalls “numerous instances where a 1000+ question RFI covering multiple topics was sent out just before a long bank holiday weekend with responses expected within 5 working days!” At EIS, for example, we have specific subject matter experts for specific areas - because of their expertise they are not “sitting on the bench” they are actively engaged in hands-on project work, R&D, other tenders etc. If your aim is to ensure you receive the most concise and accurate response, you should seriously consider the time required to assemble the best resources.

FOUR: Maintain Open Communication

From the outset you should ideally be communicating with your vendor before issuing an RFI, providing guidelines and background information, and be ready to answer questions back from them. After all, the more a vendor knows, the more customized their answers can be. Or, potentially they may decline earlier on, as this might not be a good fit. In which case you have both saved time and money.

Once an RFI is issued, allow for discussion – what do you mean by this question, how would you prefer this to be answered, what is your preferred licensing model, do you have any go-live deadlines e.g. existing licensing issues? All these factors will enable your vendors to provide the best possible response.

FIVE: Clearly Define Your Business Requirements

It’s surprising to see many documents asking contradictory or constraining questions that assume technology outcomes.

If you ask closed functionality, technical, hosting, delivery questions you will get closed answers.

For example, “Does your software have the ability to support xxxxxx?” Some software companies will answer “yes” because the software could theoretically support it given enough time and money! It’s far better to ask “HOW” the software supports something and ask for comments on the question with examples.

Equally, the context of change in insurance is increasingly an important factor, and this should be addressed up front. And this is often absent, certainly early on in these processes.

SIX: Conduct Thorough Evaluations

Not all vendors respond in the same way.?

Some will answer a simple “yes” to everything in the hope and expectation of getting to the next stage. Others will be more open with their answers. Take the time to review the answers with each vendor – and beware of over-selling.

The more successful approaches look at use cases for change, and how the IP surrounding the customer is retained, their ecosystem of vendors remains the insurers, or how data fluid and open they will be. These are all really useful frames for good evaluation of future success.

In summary

After the RFI & RFP stages, demonstrations, proof of concepts, and commercial discussions, you will rightfully select the vendor that best meets your requirements.?

Typically, this will be based on functionality, overall cost of ownership, likely ROI, and partnership approach (after all, this should be a long-term partnership), but it’s crucial that you always choose a company where you have met the people you will be working with.?

The human element in all implementations should never be overlooked, and this is particularly true of the insurance industry where claims and policy processes are complex affairs that require knowledge and experience of people who have worked in those environments to really understand the day to day challenges and also the solutions.?

There are some good examples out there, and we have been lucky enough to participate in some of those. There’s also others where it’s hard to see how this works for any of the parties involved. Making this work better is therefore probably in everyone's interest.

Hopefully this has provided a useful "supplier" view on how things could be improved. And if you're already ahead of the game then we salute you!

New ammo in the fight against insurance fraud

It was great to participate in this article from Lauren Haigh of ITIJ: International Travel & Health Insurance Journal alongside the likes of Robert (Rob) Morton , Carl Mather of Aviva , Simon Cook , Fabio Sarrico and Gary Sommerford GCGI ACFS ACFT .

See why I say things like:

???“To optimally manage the increasing threat of fraud, we need solutions that do more than simply reduce fraud rates,” said Rory Yates, SVP of Corporate Strategy, Global, at EIS. “Although this is undoubtedly the primary role of any fraud prevention system, it needs to happen in conjunction with fewer false declines and a smooth customer experience to be truly effective.”???

Click here to read more.

Climate risk and the home insurance model

Once again I got to work with the awesome Amelia Matthewson and InsurTech Digital , this time unpacking the huge topic.

Tackling this important subject is not only vital to the insurance industry, it's also very close to my heart. And thanks to brilliant journalism I once again got to tackle adaptation and resiliency within this. Topics vitally intrinsic to each other.

And it's also vital that we make sure insurance gets evermore engaged in tackling climate change head on, and that governments, agencies and other industries collaborate more with insurers.

And over this month prominent industry influencers Margeaux Giles and Lisa Wardlaw posted following their own personal experiences of storm flooding and how significant these moments are for people and the insurance industry.

There's so many answers insurance can bring, as well as being essential to humanity, enabling us to continue to live in our homes, repairing and recovering them when disaster strikes.

And we must continue to do more.

Click here to read more.

AI Takes the Wheel: Are Human Insurance Jobs in the Fast Lane to Automation?

Thanks Joanna England for covering the important sides of the AI debate in insurance.

And reading through there seems to be a lot of alignment across the contributors.

One general observation - we conflate GenAI and other AI all of the time. Regardless of which flavour, the challenge for insurers is harnessing these technologies and successfully keeping a human in the loop and a human in control.

See why I say lots of things like:

?? "We need AI to make us more human. AI will make insurance more competitive because it will create more intimacy between insurers and insureds. This new battleground becomes customer-led not price-led, and I for one am here for that!” ??

Click here to read more.

Guinness World Record

I've said it before ?? what an industry insurance is! ??

All in aid of a great cause, Cancer Research UK (CRUK) we mustered over 500 people from across the hashtag#insurance spectrum, all taking to the bike in the middle of Leadenhall market and raising over￡70,000 in the process!

Big ups to Aventum Group for making this EC3 challenge happen, and making a bunch of us Guinness World Records holders!!

Nigel Walsh - thanks for the peer pressure, it worked!! Also, I was still faster and went further, you know that right? ??

aiPhone

Jony Ive is back with his first major tech project since leaving Apple, reported to be teaming up with Sam Altman for an AI-powered hardware device!

A phone that communicates with other AI things to make other AI things communicate with other AI things?

Should be interesting, not sure it will need to be a "phone" at all. Perhaps it will just be a corporeal construct, or operate in 4d?

What I'd really like it to do is autonomously drive the right bins out on bin day, but it will probably make me wear Ray Bans as a wearable device (has that been done recently or was that my imagination?) and communicate average content on TikTok instead.

On a serious note, Linas is right, this could be a clever move. Ive's could bring a lot of "human" to this project and deliver something genuinely meaningful. Lets hope.

Click here to read more.

Overall in the last 12 months I've achieved well over 400,000 impressions and had 100,000 individuals read our content on Linkedin.

There's now nearly 1,400 subscribers to this newsletter alone, and the engagement on this often blows my mind.

And all these people combined represent a truly global audience. US (the largest proportion) then the UK represent about 60% of the overall audience, but increasingly EMEA and Asia Pac are growing in numbers. And I am grateful for this world view. What I often find even more startling is the senior level of engagement, with a varying 20-40% often having C-level titles and from insurers. Combining this with the wider appeal as well and it all feels like we are sharing critical views of the insurance industry and hopefully making a small difference in the process.

And importantly, with 90% of this content being published material, I'd like to give a massive thanks to all the news outlets and collaborators as well. And a special thanks as always to Alex Moscow Zoe Symonds and the EIS Ltd team.

Coming up soon is podcast season, and I've already recorded with Emma Ann Hughes and her guests on the Insurance Post podcast and Jeff Shi and Insurtechs.io - which was also our first direct discussion. So I am super excited to share these and others with you soon.

Thanks for reading, subscribing and collaborating. And feel free to share the newsletter - I am always open to even more subscribers!