Large captive insurers interact with hundreds of businesses (stakeholders) within the group, but without efficient data interaction and #insurtech tools, the process is hopelessly inefficient.

But what steps can be taken to improve interaction with customers? Simply hiring more staff to answer the phones is not the way to go. Instead, captives must digitise and automate wherever possible by building tools with a focus on ease-of-use and stakeholder self-service.

Poor communication and inefficient interaction

Most captives don’t have particularly good service levels, and their leadership teams recognise that there are many interaction improvements to be made. Customer satisfaction lags well behind compared with commercial insurers, mainly due to poor communication and a lack of user-friendly tools.

Efficient digital interaction means improving the ways in which information is shared between the captive, all the companies within the group, and third-party organisations such as regulators. It’s also about giving advice in an efficient manner, and being able to scale-up this advice through a digital tool for communication to stakeholders all over the world.

One of the main challenges with large captive insurers is that when stakeholders call them, the captive simply doesn’t know who they are. If I am a company within a group, the captive should know all about me and have that information at hand when I call them: who I am, what kind of risk I’m involved in (buildings, people), and then provide me with advice. This is a service advantage that is extremely under-utilised in captive insurance.

There’s plenty to gain through improving interaction efficiency, including lower costs, better service levels, better information leading to lower risk, and more time to focus on the business of insurance. All of these benefits should be in the core of the captives’ mandate.

Digitising stakeholder interaction

Captives seeking to invest in digital transformation should start by improving data quality and accessibility through having “one source of truth”; a single system that collects information.

Secondly, they should focus on making it easy to share data analytics with the owner/mother company of the group, provide advice on handling risk, share the data with reinsurers, and use the data to provide advice to stakeholders that will help avoid future accidents and claims.

These processes and interactions should be as efficient as possible through a digital tool that stakeholders can continuously update using a self-service approach.

Heineken’s captive insurer (Roeminck) provides a helpful case study in terms of improving the efficiency of interaction with its many stakeholders through digital transformation.

Without a comprehensive IT system, Roeminck had previously shared information through inefficient means such as emails and spreadsheets. This meant that data had to be collected through several different sources, effective data analysis was impossible, and visibility about which risks to insure was poor.

Roeminck partnered with Noria to implement an end-to-end insurance solution that would optimise processes, save costs, reduce risk, and (importantly) streamline communication with its large global portfolio.

Ideally, a self-service approach will enable stakeholder companies within the group to easily add or remove insured assets without the need for back-and-forth communication with the captive.

Today, Roeminck’s data is centrally accessible, with improved quality and easier retrieval. At the touch of a button, Roeminck can create hundreds of separate reports that analyse and benchmark risk at every company within the Heineken group, and provide advice (at scale) on how to improve.

Sharing information the old-fashioned way may be possible in situations where captives are dealing with a very limited number of stakeholders, but emails, spreadsheets and phone calls rapidly become unmanageable at scale.

Scalability isn’t possible without efficiency. And efficiency isn’t possible without a digital solution that improves visibility, brings your data under control, and streamlines communication with stakeholders.

Join Noria and Captive Review Webinar on 15 March

You are welcome to join our third and final part of Captive Review Digital Transformation webinar on 15th March 2022. In this webinar, we will delve into the importance and role of IT and how it can help you to harness the power of data in the business operations.

Discussion points:

• The importance of data quality for business operations, and how this is crucial for interacting with stakeholders
• The challenges, the risks and solutions
• The impacts of IT solutions

Register here. We look forward to seeing you!