New technological capabilities and InsurTech partnerships are allowing Swiss Re to create stickier and more flexible relationships with its clients, according to the company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Christian Mumenthaler.
Speaking in an interview with Bloomberg TV, Mumenthaler noted that a lot of money has been poured into InsurTech over the last two or three years, although the re/insurance industry’s tech capabilities continue to lag behind banking and other financial sectors.
He explained that huge investments would be required for many of Swiss Re’s 1,500 insurance clients across the world to become digital, particularly in the West where many firms have legacy issues.
In response, Mumenthaler said Swiss Re has developed a full end-to-end technology for primary insurance companies that provides more flexible and customisable options and improves its overall client relationships.
“We give it to them, so they can basically pick and choose which elements of the value-chain they want to take over, so they don’t have to invest two or three years and hundreds of millions into that technology but can use some of what we have,” he told Bloomberg TV. “At the same time for Swiss Re it makes us stickier in the relationship with our clients.”
Going forward, Mumenthaler added that Swiss Re sees a lot of potential to invest in new companies and create partnerships with them.
“I think generally partnership is the key word,” he continued. “I think there’s more and more companies opening up. You know all this ecosystem talk, what it means is maybe new coalitions of companies that come together to simplify the value-chain which today is very complicated in insurance.”
Another key opportunity for Swiss Re will involve leveraging technology to find ways to shorten the re/insurance value chain and reduce costs, Mumenthaler explained.
“If you think about insurance, today you have agents selling products to people, then you have insurance companies, then brokers who give it to reinsurers, who have brokers who give it to capital markets or retrocession. So a very long value-chain,” he noted.
“So in theory you can think of something much more compact, where you have companies who own customers and customers buy their product and like their product, and in theory you can include insurance in some of these products.”
