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Give your opinion on the role of technology strategies in the carrier-agent relationship Agencies, brokers, and other distributors have been busy enhancing their technology capabilities to compete in the digital age. Thus, the question of whether distributors and carriers see eye-to-eye regarding their tech plans is a critical one across all P&C sectors—but especially for more complex risks where intermediaries are likely to play a dominant role for a very long time. Due to the vital importance of the distributor-carrier relationship and the technology enablers, Strategy Meets Action, a ReSource Pro company, is placing major emphasis on conducting research to gain new insights that can aid both distributors and carriers in their technology strategies and plans. Tech plays a critical role in improving the ease of doing business, matching appetite, enhancing communications, and creating more opportunities to reach customers.

Deb Smallwood, Senior Partner, Carrier Transformation of Strategy Meets Action, a ReSource Pro company, can say with confidence that the answer is P&C insurance. While Deb has spent her entire career in the P&C industry, she continually finds new opportunities to explore the many sides of the industry: starting at Liberty Mutual in IT, then becoming partner at KPMG, and eventually founding her own consultancy, Strategy Meets Action. The pandemic has forced carriers to rethink their investments in 2021, like digital payments, digital platforms for self-service, and cloud data storage to minimize their footprint in data centers. At Strategy Meets Action, we help business executives take a step back and think out five to 10 years, define the north star guiding them, then build their transformational roadmap and make the right operational and technologies decisions at the right time to move forward.

It’s a great analytical sandbox to operate within.” As ReSource Pro’s Senior Partner, Carrier Practice, Steve will continue to help insurers optimize new business, claims, underwriting, distribution, customer experience, and policy service. We were already moving down the path toward a virtual workforce prior to the pandemic, and now we’ve accelerated something that was most likely going to happen anyway: the virtualization of the entire value chain from selling insurance to delivering it and settling a claim. It’s an exciting time to be in the business, because you have to crack problems everyone else is trying to solve, like how do we deliver data, video, and information in this new world in a way that allows us to continue to succeed in our clients’ businesses? Those are going to be tough challenges, but our clients and the industry have shown great resilience not only in the past year, but also during the global financial crisis of 2007 to 2008, 9/11, and other major catastrophes which we believed would be just as difficult.

An opportunity for insurance agencies to build agility As globalization and digitization bring new risks and complexity to the world, insurance agencies will need to build additional agility to better serve clients. In 2021, the underinsurance crisis represents an opportunity for agencies to not only create better outcomes for insureds but differentiate themselves from the competition and grow revenue through cross-selling and upselling. The hot topic of today may be virus exclusions, but we also need to help insureds determine what kind of revenue stream they need when business income coverage is triggered. Insureds often assume that an Automatic Additional Insured Endorsement is enough to protect them in the event they are sued or elect to hold someone harmless, but this kind of blanket endorsement often falls short.