What do you get when you mix 10 curious insurance professionals from 3 countries, 18 trend factors, and 2 hours on a web call? Simple: More questions than answers and a desire to press ahead on an exercise we’re calling Insurance 2023. And we’d like you to join us.
The idea started with a a challenging post on a LinkedIn Group along the lines of: ‘What will the P&C industry look like in 10 years”. There were lots of opinions, some more provocative than others. This got a few people thinking that with all the changes underway – social media, multi-channel insurers, a seemingly perpetual soft market, and changing regulation – there could be real value in try to put a little discipline around this and produce some structured opinions from a cross-section of practitioners.
The three original members came up with a list of 7 others, representing a cross section of skills and responsibility. There are practitioners (insurers, brokers) suppliers, consultants, and media. The focus is Canada, but we have practitioners from the US and the UK as well. We exchanged some email and settled on a date for a ‘live’ teleconference. That meeting occurred this past week. And we’re pretty excited and want to start sharing this with the wider community.
We came up with two lists of factors that we think will impact insurance in the next 10 years. The first list contains factors outside the industry, such as climate change, demographic trends, etc. The second list focus on factors specific to the industry, including distribution trends, market conditions, etc.
We will ask our group members to rank order these factors in importance and possible impact. We will also ask for specific examples. While these data are being collected, we’ll open a survey for you to respond to the same questions.
The deliverable from this exercise will be a summary of the findings and a list of additional areas of investigation. Our intent is to continue to refine and share the information, as well as new questions through the balance of this year and into the early months of 2013. In short, we want to look long, and wide, at the same time.
We will publish results periodically and will ask some of our colleagues to shares view in this space as well. Our goal is to have several summary sessions at the 2013 Insurance-Canada Technology Conference, March 18-19, 2013 at the Sheraton Centre Hotel (Toronto).
So what do you think of this? Are you looking out at some of the factors impacting our industry? What are some of the factors you see as significant? What is your time horizon – 3 years , 5 years, 10 or more? Are there areas you think the industry really needs to look at together?
Let us know and stay plugged in here.