EXCLUSIVE: “A Good Awakening” – Robert Burr, iptiQ in ‘The Insurtech Magazine’

Insurers now recognise that embedded products are a good route to market… but it’s not always an easy customer journey, says iptiQ CEO Robert Burr

Although still nascent, the embedded insurance industry is expected to skyrocket to $60billion in Europe, $150billion in the US and $200billion in China by 2027, according to Embedded Finance & SuperApp Strategies.One of the pioneers in embedded insurance is iptiQ, which has already struck several pivotal B2B2C deals as it looks to shake up the industry. The Swiss firm, owned by reinsurance giant Swiss Re, operates across Asia, the Americas and Europe, has two million policyholders, and is increasingly working with partners to improve accessibility to products through its white-label life and non-life insurance business.

It employs two embedded insurance strategies: a partial-service and full-service model. The former plugs into a partner’s infrastructure while the latter manages the customer experience across the entire value chain. Both strategies are bringing brands closer to their customers. Among those it works with across Europe is IKEA and Dutch peer-to-peer motorhome hire firm Goboony. In the case of the world’s biggest furniture retailer, iptiQ created a household contents and a private liability product called Hemsake. With Goboony, it launched a car-sharing per-day coverage insurance integrated into the Goboony platforms.

The solution means that vehicle owners have automatic insurance coverage every time their vehicle is hired out. While such embedded products promise to unlock huge additional markets for insurers, successfully bringing an embedded product to market is not without significant challenges – how to position the product from a marketing perspective, ensure the customer is at the heart of the proposition and that open and effective communication is maintained between the insurer and the insured are some of the key ones.

The insurance industry acknowledges that it needs to improve communication with its customers and build infrastructure that improves the interaction between policyholders and firms. With this in mind, iptiQ has recently introduced an initiative called Office of the Customer, a global team of experts in behavioural science, consumer research, and customer experience, who work with iptiQ’s distribution partners to improve experiences for customers.

Here, Robert Burr, CEO of iptiQ, sheds more light on the Office of the Customer and how embedded insurance and other trends are transforming the industry.

THE INSURTECH MAGAZINE: How has the embedded insurance market evolved since Swiss Re began to explore it?

ROBERT BURR: Swiss Re is a reinsurer for most of the world’s major insurance companies, so it’s learned a lot about how distribution works. In 2016, it started looking at what in those days was probably called affinity marketing, and how B2B2C partnerships could be used to give more people access to insurance products, because its purpose as a company is to make the world more resilient, and to close society’s protection gaps. As technology has evolved, it has taken a very active interest in investing in how we can bring that B2B2C model to life.Insurance can play a number of roles in helping large organisations forge closer connections with their customers by providing services that have genuine value.

We see ourselves as helping that process, being able to provide the best quality products to third-party partners, like IKEA, and being able to help them with their own customer journeys.Certain organisations will have their own ways of connecting with their customers, and in those situations, under our partial-service model, we plug in to their infrastructure, to provide the products that they need. When we do that, it’s important we understand the relationship they have with their customers and the technology they use to connect to them.With our full-service model, we are able to go right the way through the value chain. So people come onto the iptiQ platforms and we manage the entire customer experience. And that’s important, because nobody wants to have bits and pieces of communication, bits and pieces of interaction. It has to be a seamless process for the customer.

TIM: Why is digital trust becoming such an important issue for customers in insurance?

RB: If you go back to the days of the insurance agent, it was a very personal, face-to-face relationship. The question is, how do you recreate that in a digital world? Swiss Re, as a group, gives its own brand trust the highest possible priority in commercial relationships with clients; iptiQ follows that strategy, and it is super important that we work with partners who share that value. In fact, we’ve noticed that partners and clients call us because of the Swiss Re connection… because we take the DNA of our mothership, and apply that in the digital world.When it comes to building trust with customers, people are still adjusting to using digital means to buy products and services. Some come very naturally – we all trust the Amazon or Airbnb approach.

What we have to do is take a complex thought – protecting something you love, or somebody you love – and apply the same principle of trust to it.And that has to happen right the way across the value chain. So, when we talk to partners, we want to know if they share that same philosophy; if they believe that trust in the transaction, or in the interaction, is the highest priority they have?

Digital trust, for us, is not just about, ‘does the technology work?’. It’s about, ‘does the product work? Does the service capability work?’. Sometimes they align, and sometimes they don’t. But we’re very lucky in that we can leverage the Swiss Re footprint, which gives us probably more options than many of our peers.In India, for example, we’re in the process of building out a technology centre in Hyderabad, which will work very closely with our service centre in Bangalore. That allows iptiQ to take advantage of a group operation. Here in Europe, we have a wonderful operation in Amsterdam, which does great work both on the insurance product and service side and on the technology side.

TIM: Can you tell us more about the role of the Office of the Customer?

RB: We want to become an organisation focussed on positive and good customer outcomes. That is the starting point.There are basically three parts to the Office of the Customer; the mind of the customer, the voice of the customer, and the value of the customer. The mind of the customer is all about understanding what motivates a consumer to buy an insurance product and understand what concerns our policyholders might have, so we can manufacture even better products.

The voice of the customer allows them to interact with iptiQ, and with the partners that we work with. Allied to that is a growing amount of regulatory focus on good outcomes for customers; on being able to provide a compliance capability and a governance capability, so that we are seen by the regulators in the jurisdictions in which we operate, to be focussed on what those outcomes are.When it comes to the value of the customer, obviously, we want to ensure that customers are buying the right services for them.

At the same time, we want to make sure that it is commercially viable for us and our partners. So this is something that we discuss with partners at the beginning of the process to find out what products and service offerings they want to make over time. This is not a one-off event, this is a strategic activity over years, so it’s very important that there is alignment between the partner and iptiQ, as to what the right outcomes are for the customer. We consider it a point of differentiation for iptiQ versus our competitors.

TIM: How will technology change the insurance industry in the future?

RB: I think technology generally offers a wonderful opportunity for insurance companies to do better, in terms of the complex interactions we have with our customers, from selling to customer service, and the claims process. People don’t wake up in the morning, wanting to buy insurance, so it’s important that those interactions are high-quality, seamless, and, in many ways, on the policyholder’s terms, rather than ours.

This article was published in The Insurtech Magazine Issue 10, Page 20-21