Why Insurtech needs your VOCAL support

One of the less desirable aspects of having a relatively active mind but no all-consuming hobbies to fill the gaps between getting home from work and going back in again, is that I tend to get a bit bored from time to time. 

And so, to counteract the tedium’s more sinister symptoms - trips to the fridge, gardening, and so on - I tend to spend rather more time reading stuff on LinkedIn than would normally be considered healthy.

And this year I've been noticing some positive trends.

I’m particularly heartened, for example, by the marked reduction in posts featuring that wretched pack of wolves wandering line astern though the snow. I’m sure you’ve seen it: word-perfectly copied balderdash purporting to demonstrate an utter claptrap leadership theory supported by a factually incorrect analysis of both wolf behaviour and leadership. My blood boils whenever it pops up. (You lead from the front, by the way, not the back and any blithering idiot who tries to tell you otherwise needs stronger medication).

Another welcome absence from the feed this year has been Blockchain. Now, before you flame me to death as a heretic, I’ve absolutely nothing against the stuff when it’s employed in the right hands and for the right reasons. You only have to see the truly stunning work that insurance technology company ChainThat have done with it to appreciate that fact but, before Blockchain slid down into what Gartner’s Hype Cycle labels The Trough of Disillusionment, the noise from its evangelists (seemingly almost everyone) was deafening. And most of it was unadulterated drivel.

So, in the absence of those two clogging up the channel, there's been quite a lot more airtime available for posts to read on my favourite topic, Insurance Technology - Insurtech to its friends - and there are plenty out there. Which is most excellent.

But what grieves me is this: most, but not quite all, Insurance Technology PR comes from the technologists themselves. Very little comes from the insurance organisations who are sponsoring or using it. 

This comes as no great surprise as there has been what one can only describe as a longstanding tradition in the London insurance market whereby, in the main, companies tend to keep quiet about their technology and their tech vendors. In some cases, they even impose onerous contractual clauses to prevent any announcement or even allusion to the client/supplier relationship so no quotes, no logos and no appearing in a client list on a website. 

All of this makes it very hard for the tech vendor to shout about what they're doing and with whom. Even if everything goes perfectly but the client still remains silent, then that’s it: No announcement and no right of appeal.

Now, this may be changing ever so slowly but it is my contention that it really needs to change fast.

It is vitally important for the insurance world to modernise - that much is now, one hopes, beyond contention. A lot of that modernisation depends on new technology and quite a lot of that technology is coming from relatively small vendors – exactly the sort of firms that need all the help they can get when it comes to evangelism and PR from their big, influential insurance clients and supporters.

They need help. So please give it to them.

Client/supplier relationships work best when there is a genuine sense of partnership. If the client needs the tech company as much as the tech company needs the client, then good things can happen.

But if the client remains silent, the tech company then has to tip-toe around on eggshells, hinting at success with “an unnamed insurance company”, or whatever, and hoping the rumour mill will do their PR for them. How on earth is that helping anyone? If anything, it fosters suspicion.

Modern insurance organisations, be they brokers, underwriters, MGAs or claims managers, large or small, absolutely need strong, viable technology suppliers who have a growing roster of quality customers to help them survive and prosper. And one great way to help that is by shouting about how good they are (if they really are) and how much the partnership is benefiting you (if it really does).

A recent stand-out example of how this works so well when people get it right is the fantastic vocal PR support that the ePlacing technology company Whitespace has received this year from its clients Price Forbes, MS Amlin, Talbot Underwriting, Axa XL and others. 

It's an absolute revelation.

LinkedIn and Twitter have been alive with posts about the work they’ve been doing. And not just when they went live with their first placement this week but several months earlier when Price Forbes were positing picture after picture of genuinely happy-looking staff pointing at iPads during the system's testing and training phases, all supported with positive statements.

Now that's how to show confidence in your technology partnership.

So, if I had one rub of the Genie’s lamp and one wish to make, it would be that the market learns from this example and starts to see its technologists less as simple "vendors" (often said through gritted teeth with an optional adjectival expletive) and more as true partners, to have confidence in that partnership and show solid, vocal PR support for them from the outset.

That way, good things will happen.

And heartiest congratulations to everyone at Whitespace, Price Forbes, et al., for getting it over the line. I know exactly how hard it is to achieve that in the London market ePlacing arena and I’ll be watching progress intently...

...in between trips to the fridge and occasional bouts of lawnmowing, of course.

? Jeff Ward, 2019

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