Hurry Up and Wait

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Because we’re incorrigibly curious — and because it’s part of our professional responsibility to stay abreast of things in the industry we serve — we recently conducted an experiment on Google. We entered the phrase, coronavirus insurance industry, and searched. The search returned 496,000,000 results. The sheer number surprised us. But what surprised us more was the chronology of the results. Out of the 13 results on the first page of our search results — other than one CBS news story dated September 21, 2020, that dealt with the evolving definitions of interruption coverage — the most recent of the remaining 12 stories was from July 23, 2020.

Beyond the number and the chronology, we were struck by two other consistent aspects of our Google search results.

Let’s Review

First, many of them had to do with the new normal and hybrid operating models. Wow. The clarity of hindsight notwithstanding, it’s amazing how quickly things have changed, even as the coronavirus pandemic has seemed to slam The Big Brakes on everything. Since July, of course, we’ve realized we can’t wait for a new normal, even if there will ever be any such thing. And we’ve also realized, from the precautionary measures required to gather people in one (work)place to the cautionary tales coming from commercial real estate, that hybrid operating models have already morphed into work from home and even given us a new abbreviation: WFH.

Second, many of our search results had to do with the insurance industry’s lack of foresight when it comes to digitalizing their operations. Most insurers were relatively well-equipped for hybrid operating models and even WFH. But meeting the needs and expectations of their policyholder and prospects who live in a highly digital world? Not so much. The question for us now is: What’s next?

Let’s Do It

As they said on The Six Million Dollar Man, we have the technology. We just haven’t fully adopted it yet. But given the rate at which we’re adapting to the new rules of the coronavirus game, we also have the aptitude. All we have to do now is acquire the determination to make the necessary changes and commit the budgets to getting it done. Everyone from our WFH employees and our policyholders will thank us for it.

There’s no need to panic. But we can’t afford to hurry up and wait.

And We Quote …

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We know it’s bad form to quote ourselves. But we have to make an exception here.

We recently watched a panel discussion about the ways in which insurers responded to the effects of the coronavirus and its ensuing shut-down. One comment, from Sean Ringsted of Chubb, jumped out at us:

I draw a distinction between, say, operating remotely and the digital age. For us, the digital age is a much broader perspective in terms of how we think about product and service, and how we think about the customer. By and large, we haven’t moved forward as an industry collectively in that regard. It’s shown that we can operate remotely, but we’re a long way away from being an industry that’s operating and succeeding in a digital age.

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, we had a deja vu all over again.

You Don’t Say

Bad form notwithstanding, we couldn’t help recalling that, on October 8, 2018 we wrote this:

Digital transformation is almost always interpreted to be about technology. It’s not. Here’s why: Unless we manage to experience some kind of once-in-a-millennium event sometime soon, there won’t be any technological transformations. But what we do have is a data transformation. More specifically, with the digitalization of data — and with the technological progress we’re making in storing, extracting, analyzing, and applying data — that’s a transformation worth heeding and on which we should be capitalizing. And it feels like progress.

And on February 3 of 2020, we wrote this:

Objective #1 is to look at things from the perspective of the prospective buyer … But [insurers are] facing the sobering realities of Objective #2 — getting their core systems to function at levels sufficient to achieve Objective #1. If products remain difficult to change, if integrations continue to be a challenge, and if BI isn’t meaningful enough to improve operational decision-making — then customer behavior, responsiveness, accessible information, and self-service capabilities become tough nuts to crack.

Does that make us special? No. Does it make us clairvoyant? Uh uh. But it does make us prepared. And it makes us prepared to help our customers implement the digital platform that will enable them to scale, to accommodate market changes and policyholder demands, and to operate in the world in which their prospects and policyholders already live.

If it takes a worldwide pandemic to get us there, so be it. But we do have to get there.