Don’t Choke on Chokepoints

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The June edition of Risk & Insurance ran an article about the blocking of the Suez Canal by the cargo ship, Ever Given. In the print edition, the article was entitled, “CHOKEPOINT!” In the print and digital editions, the article starts with this:

In March, a large container ship blocked the Suez Canal for six days, costing nearly $400 million an hour in global trade losses. Now, cargo and vessel owners are asking, “Who foots the bill?”

That got us thinking about other chokepoints in the insurance industry. And while those chokepoints may not be as obvious as the blocking of the Suez Canal, the short-term, long-term, and additive costs of those chokepoints may actually amount to considerably more than $400 million.

Let’s Go To the Replay

For the sake of argument, we’ll assume a small insurance company has 100,000 premiums in force. If one administrative chokepoint costs the company just a dollar in resources (time and/or money) and opportunity per policy, eliminating that chokepoint would save the company … well, you can do that math. Chances are that insurance company,  any insurance company, has more than one chokepoint. And if you consider a large insurance company — one with 80 million policies in force, let’s say — the ROI on eliminating the corresponding chokepoints is a stakeholder’s dream come true.

In the article we’ve cited here, Marcus Baker, global head of marine and cargo from Marsh, is quoted several times. If we take one of his quotes and abbreviate it slightly, his argument extends beyond the blockage of the Suez Canal. Here’s the quote abbreviated:

We saw this problem play out early in 2020 … One of the things that this pandemic has shown us and even an incident like the Ever Given has shown us is that … Rather than focusing on the efficiency and low cost, we really need to look at a resiliency model.

That’s a pretty powerful point. It suggests resilience is precipitated by readiness. And readiness can be precipitated by making sure your people, your processes, and the technology products you use are responsive, flexible, configurable, and scalable.

We might even go so far as to suggest it takes a good chokepoint now and then to help us be prepared for the next one.

Issues and Answers – June 2021

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Rates of Change

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Figure A

We seem to have been writing and speaking a good deal lately about change — the changes undertaken during the COVID pandemic, the changes that could have and should have been considered before the COVID pandemic, and the changes we should be undertaking now in anticipation of the next pandemic or the next catastrophic business interruption. In particular, we’ve been writing and speaking about digitalization, the adoption and adaptation of digital technologies for business processes. In other words, the conversion of text, pictures, or sound into digital form for automated processing on computers, as opposed to the manual processing of analog media like paper or whiteboards.

During all of that writing and speaking, it occurred to us that the lion’s share of the friction being experienced in the move toward digitalization is attributable to rates of change. In general terms, we’re referring to the technology-adoption curve that’s typically rendered like the image in Figure A. Somewhere between the so-called innovators and the early adopters, there’s a gap. Skepticism, fear of change, and fear of failure live in that gap. As people begin to creep across that gap, the early majority and the late majority adopt a given technology as it begins to succeed and make its adopters feel safe. By the time the laggards get around to adopting the new technology, it’s already being superseded by a newer technology. And on it goes.

Context, Please

In more specific, insurance-industry terms, the gap exists between policyholders (and prospective policyholders) and the insurance companies with which they choose to do business. And the insurance industry’s historically slow pace of technological adoption and adaptation is creating greater friction and lost opportunity. To be fair, individuals (like policyholders and prospective policyholders) can explore and embrace technological advancements — and change their behaviors and their expectations — more readily and easily than companies and entire industries can. But that reality notwithstanding, friction and lost opportunity exist.

We should bear in mind that there are numerous definitions of legacy. Two of them are:

  • anything handed down from the past, as from an ancestor or predecessor
  • a gift of property; a bequest

If we remain mindful of both of those definitions — and if we embrace the technological change that shapes the behaviors and expectations of our customers — we can transform #1 into #2.

That will bring our respective rates of change much closer to each other.