Insights Blog

Director of Gracechurch, Penelope Mantzaris, offers her opinion on innovation and incremental change in the London market.

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Before Easter some of the Gracechurch team attended “Behavioural Economics in Advertising”, a WARC event hosted by Deloitte. Research Analyst Chantal d'Offay gives her take on the morning's presentations.

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Last month I attended another NGIN event, this time in partnership with Deloitte. The event presented an opportunity to reflect upon 2016 and look at predictions for the London Market going forward in 2017.

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Last month we attended the KPMG Future Leaders debate: ‘Innovation, Why Bother?’. This event aimed at providing insight to how different technologies are impacting insurance. Gracechurch Research Analyst Chantal d'Offay shares her views.

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At Gracechurch, the month of September is usually full of back-to-back client presentations and workshops, and this year is proving no different. As we pore over the results of our London Insurers Report with our clients, there is one particular query which we are being asked over and over again: as open market business shrinks, what matters, really, when it comes to pitching for facilities (in other words, is it just about price)? So, we surveyed over 400 London Market placing and producing brokers and asked those involved in facilities what matters.

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How many times have you heard the word innovation mentioned in a meeting recently? It certainly is the buzzword of the moment in the UK insurance world: the news is awash with articles, think pieces and blogs lamenting the lack of innovation in the industry, our clients working in London Market and UK regional insurance are placing it at the forefront of their agendas. Indeed we are currently working with Lloyds on the 2016 Lloyd’s Market Innovation Awards with submissions coming in thick and fast.

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Two weeks ago the country was plunged into uncertainty, as the country voted to leave the EU. Although the vote was decisive the aftermath has been anything but. Much has been written and postulated about what will become of the UK but most of this feels like pure speculation, with the real truth being that everyone is in uncharted waters. Where this leave us, only time will tell.

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The relationship between claims teams and legal advisers is changing. No longer is it just about the technical advice or the ability to beat the opposition in a dispute, nowadays law firms need to align with what the insurers are trying to achieve in terms of competing for business and meeting customers’ needs. This means that the days of just ‘hiring a Rottweiler’ are largely over and the approach needs to be more subtle, more nuanced and yes one that adds value to the insurer’s “value proposition”.

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One of the questions we are asked more and more these days is “what sort of marketing should we do?” A complex question, as ‘marketing’ covers everything from developing individual relationships to building a corporate brand, however the fundamental issue is whether commercial insurers will embrace longer-term investment in marketing, especially in a cost-constrained environment?

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This week we look at the industry through the lens of Fiona Davies, to get her thoughts on the challenges facing underwriters and how they can create more effective relationships with brokers and clients.   Fiona was previously a senior relationship broker at Willis and has been working as a consultant on a number of Gracechurch’s underwriter development projects. 

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Last week I went to an event organised by NGIN in collaboration with LCP and Guevara. The talk, held in the Lloyd’s Library, focused mainly on Guevara’s new model of car insurance - a peer-to-peer scheme which aims to give a more competitive deal to the customer - and how they are trying to disrupt the conventional insurance model.

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Have you heard of blockchains? Well, until a month ago I hadn’t, but I had heard of Bitcoin, the virtual currency, and Bitcoin is a, or rather, ‘the’ blockchain. Simply put, blockchain technology refers to a type data structure, much like a distributed database, made up of nodes called blocks. I’ll paraphrase a very (over)simplified analogy I found on Coindesk

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