Graeme Dean, head of insurance for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at insurance distribution platform Cover Genius, on supporting customers and partners during the coronavirus pandemic, and why the insurance industry needs to embrace insurtech
How is Cover Genius faring during the current climate—is everybody well and managing?
Graeme Dean: Everybody is well thankfully! As you know, Cover Genius does a lot of car hire, travel and ticketing insurance through a range of partners, including Booking Holdings, rentalcars.com, gotogate.com and AXS, so those areas are down quite considerably. We’re expecting domestic travel—and therefore car hire—to pick up strongly as countries come back online. Most importantly though, we spent the last few years diversifying away from travel so our partnerships with really large retailers, logistics companies and fintechs such as eBay, ShipStation and Ferratum are all really strong.
We’ve also enjoyed fun stuff such as office trivia and meeting everyone’s partners, pets and children when they pop in to say hi!
Some of Cover Genius’s partners, particularly in the retail and travel sectors, are under significant pressure from the coronavirus pandemic. How are you helping them to respond?
Graeme Dean: We do a ton of work in optimisation, with some of our brightest brains working in London working on pricing strategies, which is challenging in the midst of a massive black swan event. We have published some research this week that looks at attach rates for travellers heading to hotspots. It tells a really interesting story about risk perception and the genuine value of the insurance add-ons that are offered by our partners. But it also tells a story about the importance of technology-led solutions. Simply sticking up an insurance offer without consideration of changing loss rates and ways to improve them, or sticking them up with simplistic pricing, is a sure way to a dead end, especially when risk is elevated and sales are challenged.
On the retail front, we’ve found a huge upswing in our Asian and Indian businesses. Some of the largest online retailers and fintechs globally are based there and are doing admirably while traditional retail unfortunately suffers. Shopee, Lazada, Flipkart, Grab, Gojek, Tokopedia, PayTM and many others are bringing insurance innovation to markets where traditional insurers have struggled to stay relevant at scale.
How well prepared was the insurance industry to deal with a pandemic? What are some of the lessons that the industry will have to learn?
Graeme Dean: One can’t tar everyone with the same brush, but one thing we’ve seen is that corporate insurers have been very generous and effective, albeit their premiums might now be struggling. We’ve been working on employee benefit and other corporate programs for a while now and the pandemic has shown that the effort is worthwhile given the creaky claims infrastructure that underlies almost every traditional insurer in the land. Those legacy syst