Accelerating out of the pandemic with innovation and transformation

I was recently asked to participate in a panel discussion as part of the Frontiers for insurance perspective series. Hosted by KPMG Canada’s Chris Cornell, the conversation with my KPMG colleagues Gavin Lubbe and Jonathan Weir looked at how insurers are transforming their operations as they come out of the pandemic, and how they’ll reimagine their businesses for the future.

In many ways, the pandemic was a perfect storm that forced insurance organizations to change, not least because everything around them was changing. Now that the storm has weakened, insurers have an opportunity. Those that maintain the momentum and continue making changes will redefine what “best in class” means.

One of the biggest opportunities for insurers was to review and re-examine their expense base in light of the different costs and categories that emerged during the pandemic. Having made hard decisions about what could be stopped, what could change, and what needed to start, some insurers went even further, and looked internally at ways to drive efficiency and reallocate spending to support the digital transformations they’d just undertaken, in particular around customer and employee gains.

Those employee gains have started insurers along a path to a redefined workplace of the future, and that’s opened eyes into strengths, capabilities and weaknesses, and how insurers can best work with those. Now that insurers have embraced working from home, there’s a new realization about the need for trusted relationships and alliances that can supplement those capabilities.

Another area where insurers need trust is with the Board. Boards offer diversity of thought and varied perspectives across different industries. They play a critical role in reimagining the art of the possible, and even after the pandemic, I think we’ll see those diverse perspectives help insurers continue the process of reimagining the transformation roadmap. The pandemic inspired insurers to do things differently, and many companies are now primed to think about big transformation as opposed to incremental change. And I think the biggest leaps of innovation – in particular reimagining the customer journey – are still to come.

Watch the full discussion here.