Think Insurtech culture before Insurtech adoption

Large insurance corporates have scale, customers, capital, business and market knowledge, regulatory expertise, licences, and the resources startups can only dream of. Startups are innovative, agile, creative, focused, customer-centric, opportunity-driven, tech-savvy, and change-oriented. Sounds like we have a match! However, dating and building relationships is often more complicated than it sounds

Why culture is critical for adoption of Insurtech models

• “The challenge of Insurtech is how to make new ideas work in an organization whose ways of operating haven’t really changed and neither has its ability to embrace change’’

• The reality is that “Insurtech cannot solve any of these problems but its successful adoption can be significantly be undermined by them’’

There is no better quote that best depicts the insurance problem I have come across than this;

“The customer only buys trust — or a promise of trust when times are hard’’. This tempts intermediaries to sell insurance using the tactics of fear and commoditization. This propensity often leads to misrepresentation; it leads to dissatisfaction; temptation leads to fraud; suspicion and a breakdown of trust lead to dysfunctional claims systems; and so it goes

There is an ingrained sense that insurers and their cronies will sell anything to anyone and then do anything to avoid paying claims

The insurance model is effectively a reverse freemium model as everyone pays for the benefit of the few who claim (pool). Customer trust is key