Weathering the Storm in Complex Insurance

In the summer of 2013 Celent conducted a global survey of insurers as well as a series of interviews with insurers involved in complex P&C insurance in Europe. Celent sought to understand the drivers and challenges in today’s economy, and found a market going through extraordinary change.

Insurers are clearly responding to a new normal — a chain of events set in motion by the financial crisis and now redefining markets. Insurers and reinsurers may have historically dodged restructuring efforts, and this has had effects on the culture of organisations, but now the need for both efficiency and growth has a steel grip on the market.

The pressures are global: the continuing financial situation, the more intense influence of investor and stock market pressures, and of course the rise in frequency and cost of catastrophes. The pressures are also internal, as the need for profitable growth and changing work practices chip away at an old culture.

How are insurers responding? In the report Weathering the Storm in Complex Insurance, Celent seeks to understand the influence of digitisation and the role of agility.

“Insurers are hunting risks, looking for markets within markets and deploying an array of data and tools to help them,” says Craig Beattie, Senior Analyst with Celent’s Insurance Group and author of the report. “Those insurers who feel themselves to be unaffected by the new normal, who are carrying on as they always have, will find themselves fighting hungry competitors for the business that used to arrive at their door.”

This report discusses the many subtle and not so subtle ways the market has changed in the last few years, and how the greatest impact has been cultural. We also make projections for the true effects of this new perspective and new culture, which have yet to be fully realised.