EXCLUSIVE: “QuestionTime” – James Russell, esure Group in ‘The Insurtech Magazine’

‘Transformation’ is often a buzzword, but at esure it’s a mission statement. It wants to transform itself and the entire insurance ecosystem, as James Russell explains

If you’ve ever gone through the frustration of an insurance claim that turned out to be way more complex than it needed to be, James Russell feels your pain. His role at the UK’s esure Group – which includes P&C provider esure and the pioneering Sheilas’ Wheels motor and home insurance brands – is ‘insurtech and business transformation lead’. It’s a weighty title to bear, but as a former insurtech founder himself, he’s up for the challenge.

“At esure our ambition is to fix insurance for good,” he says. By which he means not just replacing outdated CX and legacy processes with digital bells and whistles, but rather using the technology to address fundamental shortcomings in claims management that annoy the hell out of customers, and no doubt the staff who bear the brunt of complaints. Missteps, manual delays and poor communication also add cost, increasing premiums across the industry and baking in dissatisfaction. From the customer’s perspective, common sense rarely seems to prevail; equally, institutionalised thinking often crushes any insider attempt to question why insurers do things the way they do.

So, it’s refreshing to hear that transformation at esure – which has been in the business for 20 years – starts with just that. And, asking the obvious, it turns out, gets some pretty impressive results. Take the question: ‘would you be happy to accept a recycled part on a repair to your car?’ More than half of esure’s customers said yes, and so, working with the integrated salvage and vehicle recycling company SYNETIQ, it increased the use of recycled parts by 42 per cent between 2021 and 2022, thus alleviating one of the biggest cost pressures for motor insurers and their policyholders – namely, a critical shortage of motor parts in the post-COVID, post-Brexit supply chain.

At the same time, that’s helping to fulfil esure’s pledge to reach net zero by 2050, and created a nationwide network of low-carbon body shops. Esure incentivises them to onboard to the Green Parts programme by letting them keep all the profit margin on those parts, which are guaranteed to be A or B grade.

“We are seeing real inflation in car parts, and a lack of availability,” says Russell. “That means customers are having to wait longer to get their cars repaired, which means that courtesy car provision is extended, and it all adds to the cost. So we’re working hard with our supply chain partners to take out the friction, delays, and the shortages, to get people back on the road, and get their claim settled as quickly as possible.”

“If we can understand our customers better up front – the fact that they would be willing to use green parts if their car needs to be repaired, for instance – we already know how they want to be treated when they experience a traumatic event. By the way, we also have a scheme where, if a customer forgoes taking a courtesy car, we’ll plant a tree to recognise that they’ve made a sustainable choice.“So, for me, it’s about that partnership between the insurer and the insured,” says Russell. “We pay our premiums as customers, and, hopefully, we don’t have to make claims. But it’s the premiums of the many that pay for the claims of the few, so it’s incumbent on us and our customers to work collaboratively to keep those costs under control.

“For me personally, having come from a corporate as well as an insurtech background, it’s also important to work for a company that is committed to being sustainable and influencing the industry for the good of society and the environment.”

When Russell joined the company in 2021, having exited his business insurance startup Brisk, esure was just starting to rethink its strategy. Since then, it’s made a significant investment ‘in replatforming everything that underpins how we deliver insurance and services to customers’.

“We’re working with Amazon Connect for customer communications and with EIS, as the core back-end administration platform, with Kofax and SmartCOMM – so, a lot of leading tech providers to make sure we’ve got a technology platform that puts us on the best footing possible to support our front-line claims specialists and CX.

“It’s the premiums of the many that pay for the claims of the few, so it’s incumbent on us and our customers to work collaboratively to keep those costs under control”

“We’re also transforming the culture and the way that we, as individuals, work with technology, data and data science. Yes, technology is part of it but it’s about technology and humans working together.”So, how does that translate into the all-important claims experience?

“It’s all about taking out the friction and the noise that just gets in the way for the customer, but also for our claims specialists,” says Russell. If a customer chooses to use the website to make and follow their claim ‘we’re surfacing and offering up bits of information that are relevant’, he explains. “

So, if there wasn’t a third party involved, or there was no injury, we’re not going to bombard them with lots of questions about that if it’s not relevant. The experience adapts, depending on the circumstance for the customer.“We ask how the customer wants to be kept informed – through email, text, voice – so we can tailor the outbound communications to them. And we’re now

deploying a live dashboard that shows customers where their claim is at, and what’s going to happen next. From an internal claims specialist, back-end point of view, when we receive documents, we’re reading them automatically and working out which ones need to go to the top of someone’s work queue.”

Russell’s ambition is for esure to forge new ways of utilising AI in the claims process, to demonstrate that if the technology is ‘used in the right way, it can help make claims settlement more accurate but also make that experience far easier and obvious for the customer.’“You go on to Google or Apple Maps and say ‘I want to go from A to B,’ and it’ll work out all this stuff in the background, but it’s simple for the user. That’s the type of experience I want our customers to have.”And he’s not just talking about esure’s but the entire industry’s.

“There’s a real opportunity for financial services as a whole to collaborate in the service of the customer,” he says. “Providing we are responsible, and the customer consents to it, how can we use all the data that exists, between their bank, their insurance company, and other parties, to understand the customer, what their needs are, and try to prevent bad things from happening to them?

“I don’t want to be just following what others are doing,” says Russell. “I want us to be at the forefront.” With over two million customers across its two brands, esure isn’t the biggest insurer in the UK, but you don’t have to be big to be powerful and Russell believes it has a roadmap to deliver great things.

“I’d break it down into four steps. We’ve got to get the fundamentals in place, so that we can settle claims and deliver that customer promise, with a really well-oiled machine. That’s the first one.

“The second one is how we connect that ecosystem, and get the data flowing to where it needs to flow – whether that’s to a repairer, or a building company, to the company that’s going to replace the person’s mobile phone that got lost… how do we work with that supply chain?

“Then it’s about working with other partners in that ecosystem, to identify where we could prevent bad things from happening. And, lastly, how do we do that in a sustainable way, that is in the interest of the customer, the environment, and society?

“There is still so much complexity about financial services and insurance that really frustrates me. But you’ve got to be in the mix to try and influence it. “And it’s not just about delivering what the customer needs; it’s also about reducing the costs. Because if, actually, we can reduce the time that it takes us to settle a claim, it reduces the cost of handling and settling that claim, which in turn we can then pass on to the consumer. So it’s really important that we try to be as efficient and as lean as possible.“We’ve absolutely got to continue to provide the protection that people need, but we’ve got to stay competitive while at the same time not adding too much to people’s cost of living, because, if you own a car, for instance, you have to have insurance, it’s a mandatory purchase. That’s front of mind for me and my colleagues.”

This article was published in The Insurtech Magazine Issue 10, Page 28-29