…. is the title of Rob Galbraith’s bestselling book (yes folks, written by an insurance underwriter and a bestseller on Amazon!). Rob featured as a fantastic keynote speaker at this conference and painted a picture of how insurance will change over the next ten years. His common sense and logic was inescapable and very credible as he has such deep domain knowledge of the industry and its complexities. It was an uplifting illumination of what motivates such passion in the insurtech sector and its founders to create a positive change in the world for customers and the entire ecosystem.
A highly engaging and varied agenda was set up with another keynote presentation from Hugh Terry and @Simon Phipps from The Digital Insurer who demonstrated an impressive depth of global expertise around the world of insurtech. If you aren’t a registered user of their site I would totally recommend a visit to check it out.
Other notable topics in this year’s programme were distribution (with a consensus amongst various presenters that the role of the broker will be even more important in the future); an outlook of the investment landscape; and we were able to learn about how innovation is increasingly helping underwriting and claims departments. I particularly enjoyed learning from Ryan Bank about the Geospatial Intelligence Centre’s work on geospatial mapping capabilities and would encourage anyone to check it out as a great initiative where the industry collaborates for the good of all. It may also be a brilliant data source for those working in that space.
This year’s event was once more well supported by InsurTechNZ and its members with Jason and I both working on the organising committee with Insurtech Australia and ANZIIF events coordinators. On stage we had Michael Lovegrove from JRNY discussing some of the barriers for insurtech. The programme also featured @Matt Ralph from Montoux presenting on why pricing practices must change if we are to transform successfully to deliver better customer outcomes and satisfy the changing demands of regulators. We also ran the closing session on day 1 with a very lively Q&A session on What’s Changing in the Customer Space moderated by Kai Dwyer and featuring insights into AA Insurance’s values driven customer approach explained by Aaron Dickinson live from NZ via Skype (a conference first). The session was centred around issues of trust in insurance and included interesting findings from DXC Technology’s detailed survey presented by Stuart Bremner.
This year’s conference was once again well supported and engaging for the attendees. ANZIIF have once again proven their ability to put on a professional show at a first class venue. I encourage all InsurTechNZ members to consider attendance at future events and to look no further than ANZIIF if they would like to develop their knowledge and understanding of the insurance industry. After all, understanding how protection products and services work for customers is an essential component of building relevant insurtech with good product/market fit.
