How are the evolving regulations shaping your company’s sales trends?
Regulation is having a profound influence on our industry. When one strips the veneer back, it is all about making savings simple, accessible and reducing complexity.
In many of our markets, insurance penetration levels are still low so, while the industry is currently undergoing a range of growing pains as new regulatory norms are embedded, the long-term impact on business levels will be positive.
In some markets this journey is proving to be rather challenging as the sectors offerings try and align with rapidly evolving local regulatory conditions – Hong Kong and the fall-off in unit-linked Regular Premium sales is a case in point.
Rather than looking at sales trends, I think a more telling exercise is to see how it is impacting on product and service design. If one discounts the short-term tactical changes, the real long-term impact of regulation on our sector will, I believe, steer us back towards truly insurance-rich products.
What are your concluding thoughts?
As our industry goes through a period of significant and sustained change, the place for ‘generalists’ is becoming more limited.
Future business prosperity will require companies to totally reimagine the customer experience, forging new relationships built on a recognition of a new more empowered and less tolerant customer.
I believe to succeed in the long-term, companies will need to take a more focused approach to their business, get closer to their customers and migrate from deploying generic solutions to ones that are more reflective of their specific client segment’s needs. This is at the heart of the revolution that we in Generali Worldwide are applying to our business.
