Commercial Lines - Mid-year update

It was brilliant to be back at the BIBA Conference this year, connecting with our brokers, meeting new people, and catching up with old friends. As always, the event proved an invaluable opportunity to network, with a great mix of prearranged and ad-hoc meetings and some socialising along the way. Our teams are now busy following up the plentiful leads and opportunities generated, one of the key reasons that makes BIBA such an unmissable event.

So, what’s been happening in our commercial business since my last update??

I’m happy to report that our hard work in the second half of 2023 and first half of 2024 has resulted in our being back on track in terms of profitability and performance for 2024.?You’ll recall I referred to profitability being our top priority for this year, and a necessity for any business wanting to invest and build for the long term. This positive news means we can be confident that our 2024 plan is working, and that allows us to place our focus squarely on delivering for our brokers and their customers.

In terms of delivering to our plans we are more committed than ever to our broker distribution.?We’ve been doing extensive work to improve our service to our partner brokers and their commercial clients.?To help with that we have recruited twenty-three new people into our Schemes, Mid-Market, SME and Sales teams.?I’ve also appointed a new Commercial Underwriting Director - Debbie Gourlay.?Debs has a wealth of experience in the UK and Global markets.?For more details see our LinkedIn article.

Debs has hit the ground running. She has been working to empower our regional teams to write more business, putting in place the highest levels of underwriting authority in each Region.?This enables our trading underwriters to routinely make faster decisions providing a much more responsive service to brokers.

How have our regional breakfasts been going?

We’ve also hosted several regional breakfast meetings this year for key broker stakeholders, attended by our Senior Leadership Team and our CEO, Georges de Macedo. These meetings have facilitated open conversations about our progress and plans and have given a great opportunity to further explore how we can work together to write profitable business.??

One example is our recently launched ‘Rollover’ proposition. This proposition provides an agile and flexible way for brokers to move portfolios of commercial business to Covéa.? Alongside this, we’ve launched a ‘Fast-Track’ renewal process to speed up our renewal processes and increase our speed of response. The aim, of course, is to make it really easy for brokers to do business with us.

We’re also connecting our internal teams and recently hosted our ‘One Distribution’ conference for all our external facing people. It’s about sharing knowledge and opportunities and supporting development. The aim is for everyone to be on the same page and avoid duplication of effort which will translate into a more joined up approach and better service for our brokers.

Harnessing the opportunities of technology and innovation, we’re continuing to work with our data and AI team to explore ways to deploy its capabilities to enhance service delivery for Commercial Lines customers.?We’ve recently completed the first phase of our data development/investment, which will in time provide higher quality data to our business leaders, underwriters and data scientists.?We anticipate this key development ?will come to fruition later this year.

So, what does the rest of the year have in store?

We’re putting more resource into our regional teams and recruiting more people to increase service and underwriting capability in Mid-Market and SME. We’re also investing in our SME, Schemes and Mid-Market platform which will improve our efficiency and enhance our approach to pricing.?Overall we will continue to focus on doing what we’re good at, delivering for our customers and delivering our plan, or in other words, doing what really matters.