Insurance/Insurtech Trends in Europe!

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Over the coming weeks, we will be taking you through all of our Regional Profiles, starting today with Europe. These profiles are taken from our inaugural Insurance Nexus Global Trend Map, an in-depth quantitative-qualitative account of Insurance & Insurtech trends the world over.

Access all seven of our Regional Profiles straight away by downloading the full Trend Map here ...

Our Europe profile combines quantitative insights derived from our global survey, some of which we covered in our previous post introducing our Regional Profiles, and qualitative perspectives from our two in-region commentators:

  • Switzerland-based venture capitalist Spiros Margaris, VC (InsureScan.net, moneymeets & kapilendo)
  • Charlotte Halkettformer General Manager of Communications at UK-based telematics provider Insure The Box (now MD of Buzzvault at Buzzmove)

Firstly, a quick overview of the salient stats from our survey, as they manifested themselves in Europe..

 

Key Stats: a Quick Recap

--- i) The External Challenges: Europe

In Europe, the top three external challenges facing the insurance industry as a whole follow the global trend we outlined in our earlier post on Industry Challenges: 'Technological advancement', 'Changing customer expectations' and 'Digital channel capabilities'.

Looking further down the table, some points of note are the higher position attained by ‘Increased regulation’ and the lower positions of ‘New emerging risks’ and ‘Catastrophe risk’. Compared to some of the other regions we examine, like Africa and Asia-Pacific, Europe is relatively sheltered from natural catastrophes and the associated risks that they bring with them, which possibly explains the lower scores we find for ‘New emerging risks’ and ‘Catastrophe risk’.

--- ii) The Internal Challenges: Europe

Internally, the top challenges are close to the global trend we outlined in our earlier post on Industry Challenges: ‘Lack of innovation capabilities’ and ‘Legacy systems’ take first and second place respectively, with ‘Siloed operations’ edging out ‘Finding and hiring talent’in third place.

--- iii) Insurer Priorities: Europe

These are the priority areas on which European insurers lead our other regions, out of our shortlist of 15 priority areas presented in our earlier post on Insurer Priorities:

--- iv) Europe Top Trumps

The table below is in the style of Top Trumps, with a regional score for each characteristic — we have tables for North America and Asia-Pacific in their respective profiles too. A full explanatory key is included within the full Trend Map, which you can of course download for free whenever you like.

Our discussion on Europe falls into five broad 'chapters', the first two of which we cover in today's post:

1) Growth opportunities in a relatively saturated market

2) The European consumer and Europe’s ‘early adopter’ status

3) How European insurers can deliver on their customer promise with new tech

4) Dynamic, real-time insurance and IoT

5) Progress on developing connected insurance models across the continent

Chapters 3-5 of our Europe Profile will be presented in our next post. Access everything straight away as part of the full profile, if you don't want to wait!

Get your full copy of the Insurance Nexus Global Trend Map, free of charge here!

 

1. Old Problems — New Solutions

While Europe, with a population of 750 million people, is a larger market than North America, it is still less than a fifth of the size of what we estimate for our Asia-Pacific region (4 billion). We therefore expect Europe to be relatively well aligned with North America in terms of the range of market opportunities on offer. 

That said, Europe does comprise a broader spectrum than North America, including some of the world’s leading economies (United Kingdom, Germany, France) alongside more emerging markets (like much of the former Soviet Bloc), which are not as advanced per sebut offer attractive growth opportunities. 

As is the case globally, low interest rates are adversely affecting insurers’ investment outlook and forcing them to refocus on their core underwriting business. In Europe, this situation is compounded by a stringent regulatory environment (Solvency II), which makes running a profitable investments business harder still.

‘Solvency II regulation is good, but in the kind of environment where we have low interest rates, it makes it much harder for insurers to find opportunities to make money,’ comments Swiss-based VC Spiros Margaris.

This is borne out in the survey stats we gathered on regulation, which we presented in our earlier post on Regulation

  • Among our key regions, Europe leads on Regulation as a priority area
  • In our Regulation section, a relatively high proportion of European respondents indicated that regulation was impeding progress at their organisations 'a lot', with Solvency II and the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD) being identified by European respondents as cause for concern
  • Also, consistent with our other regions, a large majority of European respondents believed regulation was posing more of a challenge to their organisations presently than during the previous 12 months

"European carriers have a raft of incoming regulation to implement and prepare for… In addition to the implementation of Solvency II, we can also point to the IAIS’s Insurance Capital Standard (ICS) slated for 2020, the introduction of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and the transposition into national law of the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD) in time for 2018."

James Vincent, General Manager at Insurance Nexus

Interest rates and regulation make it imperative for insurers to seek growth and profit opportunities elsewhere. And while there does exist a low-end market opportunity in Europe, this is nowhere near on the scale we see in Asia-Pacific, Africa and LatAm (which we explore in subsequent Regional Profiles!). This means that, in the main, insurers must focus on established demographics and look either for entirely new risk categories or for ways to serve their clients’ existing risks better and more extensively.

Access all seven of our Regional Profiles straight away by downloading the full Trend Map here ...

A key emerging risk area on the commercial side is cybersecurity, as we will see also in our Regional Profiles on North America and Asia-Pacific. This isn’t entirely new as a risk category but looms larger and larger for any company operating with customer data (i.e. every company). Unfortunately, cyber risk is not an easy category of risk to insure, given the wide range of dependencies involved, spanning everything from reputational damage to share-price hits. It is partly for these reasons, Margaris notes, that many insurers have been reluctant to jump on the cyber bandwagon, at least for now.

See also: Insurance Nexus Global Trend Map #12 Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is also an issue that insurers are on the receiving end of, insofar as they steward vast quantities of customer data, all of which must be secured. Consistent with our other regions, a majority of European (re)insurers are very concerned about information security breaches, as we saw in our earlier post on Cybersecurity; fortunately, a majority also have mitigation plans and have adjusted their security strategy in order to reflect the rise of new digital platforms.

Beyond exploring completely new risk categories, like cybersecurity, insurers in Europe will find fresh profits by focusing on what they have always done – only better. 

Retention of existing business is therefore of primary importance, and we did indeed find a high focus on customer loyalty among European insurers in our post on Marketing and Customer-Centricity. Part of this also involves increasing the lifetime value of customers already on the books, with around half of European respondents indicating that they have a strategy to bundle and upsell products based on customer lifestyle analytics, consistent with our other regions, as we recounted in our section on Product Development.

See also: Insurance Nexus Global Trend Map #8: Marketing and Customer-Centricity

"There is an abundance of capital available in the global economy, and right now money is cheap. There is minimal value in continually driving down price and adding further competition to a saturated market place. Putting digital at the core of distribution strategies will allow previously untapped markets to be exploited for a relatively low cost, allowing that capital to be deployed more effectively."

Gareth Eggle, Head of Insurance at Flint Hyde

Additionally though, growth for European Insurers will come from going after new customers in the established demographics, and this will require carriers to better adapt their existing products to the sorts of risks people want to insure against and to offer them at an appropriate price. While this new drive towards customer-centricity will, generally speaking, result in lower premiums (insurance is not a designer item, and less is always more from a price perspective), it also allows greater scale and, ultimately, lower operating costs.

If we take the UK motor-insurance market as an example, we see that there is plenty of old business to be better served and new business to be won. Charlotte Halkett, speaking from her past experience as General Manager at telematics provider Insure The Box (Charlotte is now MD of home-line Insurtech Buzzmove), mentions that the cost of motoring in the UK is a particular challenge and draws attention to unlimited liability as well as to various government-influenced changes, such as the Odgen Rate, which disproportionately affects younger drivers less well-placed to front the cost of auto insurance.

It is this opportunity – not just to improve driver safety but to bring down the cost of motoring – that Insure The Box is taking full advantage of. By monitoring driver behaviour through telematics, the company is able to incentivise safer driving behaviours and ultimately guide motorists to lower premiums. We will explore their Usage-Based Insurance (UBI) model in our next post, in which we continue to explore key Insurance and Insurtech trends in Europe.

See also: Insurance Nexus Global Trend Map #15 Product Development

While Insure The Box forms part of an incumbent insurer’s technology stack through its parent company Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance Europe, it is unlikely that the new play for personalised, customer-centric insurance will work out solely for the benefit of incumbents. Indeed, the opportunity is already attracting many new market entrants (like Insurtechs), who represent a serious threat to legacy insurers’ hitherto cosy models.

Margaris gives a high-level explanation as to why Insurtechs are such a threat to traditional players:

‘Consumers will ask themselves why is it so much cheaper with an Insurtech company and why does it cost so much at the insurer’s end? So there will increasingly be a margin pressure. The example I often present: if somebody gives the milk away for free, will you go to the deli and pay $1? You’ll say, I get it free there. I want to stay with you, but I’m not going to pay you a dollar for it. And that’s what Fintech/Insurtech does, it piles on margin pressure.’

Even if insurers can get the price of their products down, Margaris still believes Insurtechs have an edge due to their stronger customer credentials.

‘If Insurtech companies provide solutions that feel very personalised, customised to the user’s needs, people will feel like what their insurance company is offering is so old-fashioned,’ he elaborates. ‘So there will be dissatisfaction with the incumbent services that they’re getting, and of course pressure not to pay up for that.’

Much of the difference between old-fashioned and newfangled comes down to the user interface. In this regard, Margaris compares the old and the new in insurance to the old and the new in software:

‘If we go back 15 years and look at the user experience with software then – nowadays, you’re left asking, how did people use it? But at that point we thought it was cutting-edge. Now though, people don’t want to think about what they’ve got to do, everything has to be seamless.’

Price and Personalisation (the two Ps) are the two key areas that insurers have to work on as they square up to new market entrants. We will see later on in our Europe Profile that insurers’ ability to lower premium prices in fact goes hand-in-hand with improving personalisation – in the sense that more frequent customer touchpoints and interactions provide the very data insurers need to price accurately and to offer the incentive of lower prices still.

"Anyone who believes that business will stay as in the past, will face a so-called 'Kodak' moment and will not survive increasing competition. There is an urgent need to systematically deal with innovation and challenge the current offering or even business model."

Monika Schulze, Global Head of Marketing at Zurich Insurance

Get the complete profile for Europe straightaway as part of the full Insurance Nexus Global Trend Map ...

 

2. Europe as Early Adopter

The trends we have just outlined – falling investment returns and a renewed drive towards customer-centricity – all manifest themselves, in some way or another, in the other markets we examine in the course of our Regional Profiles, as does the growing threat/opportunity of Insurtech. But how does Europe compare to other markets in this regard?

See also: Insurance Nexus Global Trend Map #2 Insurtech Perspectives

Throughout this report, we have characterised the current disruption sweeping through the insurance industry as being customer-driven. We further identified its roots in the growth of digital outreach and distribution channels, not just in insurance but in the online economy more generally (a case in point being online retail), in the sense that these open up formerly captive markets to fleet-footed digital competitors.

"From IoT in the field to analytics and emerging AI solutions at the backend, European carriers are grasping with both hands everything the technology community has to offer in their bid to win the race for the customer. This promises to be a very exciting period for solution providers!"

Guy Kynaston, Commercial Director at Insurance Nexus

Based on the statistics we presented in our foregoing posts on Global Trends and Key Themes, we have reason to believe that Europe is not just a heavily disrupted market but one in which insurers are showing themselves relatively well-equipped to deal with this, compared to our other key regions (this comes of course with the caveat that the European market varies substantially from country to country in ways we can only explore here at a relatively high level!).

In our post on Marketing and Customer-Centricity, we characterised Europe and Asia-Pacific as exhibiting a marginally more ‘problematic’ insurer-customer relationship than North America. In Europe’s case, we pointed to the high priority score (higher than our other key regions) that it achieved for Customer Centricity (56 compared to North America’s 51) — see Insurer Priorities. Our thesis was that higher customer expectations in the region were driving customer-centricity not just high up but to the very top of the European priority rankings.

In line with our view that changes to distribution are intimately tied up with disruption in insurance, we expected to find a relatively shaken-up distribution landscape in Europe. A few thoughts on this:

  • The digital direct-to-customer channel is well-established in Europe (as we saw in our post on Distribution, if any region is a laggard, it is North America)
  • Affiliate partnerships have a long tradition in Europe, for instance with Tesco insurance in the UK, and a majority are increasing their distribution through these channels
  • We know anecdotally that aggregator impact is high in Europe, likely a consequence of the volume of direct business and the plethora of digital channels

While distribution disruption is what fundamentally enables customer disruption, these two trends are ultimately bound together with consumers, once empowered, setting ever higher precedents for distribution. Halkett gives a brief overview, from a UK perspective, of this consumer/distribution complex:

‘The UK consumer is a very early adopter of things like online retail purchasing, and that means that new entrants can get to their market much more easily than in other markets.’

She continues: ‘The UK insurance market has been the most innovative for many years. They were the first to have direct insurance and the first to then start widescale adoption of aggregators, and now Insurtech leads in the UK as well.’

Aggregators in particular allow new entrants to get in front of a vast number of consumers with minimal upfront cost. Halkett recalls how it was the aggregator route that first brought her former employer, start-up Insure The Box, to prominence:

‘We started with almost no brand, no marketing spend, we got onto our first aggregator and that meant that lots of consumers could see our proposition very, very quickly. That’s how you find those early adopters and that’s how the ball starts rolling. The UK consumers are very willing to try different financial products this way.’

Aggregators are particularly well-established in the motor-insurance sector, and Halkett estimates that the percentage of UK customers that use an aggregator before taking out a policy is in the 80% range and that this rises into the high nineties for young drivers.

Get the complete profile for Europe straightaway as part of the full Insurance Nexus Global Trend Map ...

Based on the two lines of enquiry we have pursued in this chapter on 'Europe as an early adopter' (high customer priority and a wide-open distribution landscape), we conclude that disruption has definitely arrived in Europe, and that the European market may in this respect be marginally ahead of the North American market.

We feel similarly about Asia-Pacific, although it appears that the disruption wave is only just breaking over this market (and will explore this further in our forthcoming profile for this region). On the other hand, it is our conviction that European (re)insurers have already gone some way towards establishing a new normal and are relatively well-equipped to deal with disruption. 

One key measure that speaks for this is the fact that it is Asia-Pacific, not Europe, that trails on cross-channel consistency (as we noted in our post on Distribution). If Europe is marginally ahead here, this would suggest that European insurers’ omnichannel strategies – a reaction to disruption – have gone some way towards flattening out the fractured distribution landscape. Similarly, we can point to the lower prominence, compared to Asia-Pacific, of the Chief Customer Officer role in Europe among recent or imminent appointments (see the Services, Investments and Job Roles section).

The lower importance of the Chief Customer Officer appears at first glance hard to square with the high priority Europe currently accords to customer-centricity. However, rather than Chief Customer Officer and other customer-related job roles being unimportant in Europe, we might conclude instead that they are simply not of recent creation. In Asia-Pacific by comparison, which we have suggested is only now feeling the full force of customer-driven change, Chief Customer Officer is the stand-out new job title.

See also: Insurance Nexus Global Trend Map #4 Services, Investments and Job Roles

Intuitively, we expect new job roles to get created when the perception of a market threat is at its highest, in some sense as a knee-jerk reaction. If we infer from our job-role stats that Chief Customer Officer is currently all the rage in Asia-Pacific but was last year’s role in Europe, the implication is that the wave currently breaking over Asia-Pacific broke over Europe a short time ago and that Europe is marginally further along with its journey towards tomorrow’s new normal. 

The key stat to bear in mind here is the ‘disruption score’ relating to lost market share that we introduced in our Insurtech Perspectives section: only a small minority of carriers in Europe (23%) reported that they are currently losing market share to new entrants. We already emphasised the psychological component of this score in our Insurtech Perspectives post, so – at least in terms of how European (re)insurers perceive their own market – Europe is in less deep trouble than Asia-Pacific, where 47% of (re)insurers believed they were losing market share.

‘I think European insurers are not panicked yet that the Insurtech companies will destroy their business,’ comments Margaris. ‘We haven’t seen much business deterioration through Insurtech companies yet, but it will happen, that’s certain.’

It would therefore appear that Europe is not so much the most disrupted of our key regions as the longest-disrupted. In line with this reasoning, it is Asia-Pacific that could be termed the most disrupted, in the sense that it is being hit by a storm that Europe has entered already, and North America the least disrupted, in the sense that the storm has not (quite!) broken yet. We explore the nature of disruption in the APAC and North American markets in greater detail in our upcoming dedicated profiles on these regions.

"From the measures we have gathered – covering customer-centricity, distribution and market dynamics – it appears that carriers in Europe are marginally more mature than their North American and Asia-Pacific counterparts, as insurance prepares for its big, tech-powered turn. While Insurtech remains the ultimate challenger, European insurers' confidence in their own armoury is still intact."

Alexander Cherry, Head of Research and Content at Insurance Nexus

Get the complete profile for Europe straightaway as part of the full Insurance Nexus Global Trend Map ...

None of this is to imply that the material level of disruption in Europe is declining or that the storm has been ridden – far from it – just that insurers have gone further to take it on board. Indeed, as Margaris has pointed out, more business deterioration is likely on its way. There is also no reason for markets to develop in a linear fashion, with innovations (and threats) arriving onto the market in a constant stream, so relative confidence among insurers today could turn into (or back into) panic pretty much overnight.

For the time being though, we believe we have discerned a slight innovation lead in Europe, which we explore further in our next post, in which we cover off the remaining 'chapters' in our Europe Profile:

  • How European insurers can deliver on their customer promise with new tech
  • Dynamic, real-time insurance and IoT
  • Progress on developing connected insurance models across the continent

Stay tuned for our full full profiles on North America, Asia-Pacific, LatAm, the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia, which you can of course access straight away by downloading the full Trend Map (it's free!).

For any inquiries relating to the Insurance Nexus Global Trend Map, this on-going content series or next year's edition, please contact:

Alexander Cherry, Head of Research & Content at Insurance Nexus (alexander.cherry@insurancenexus.com)

 
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