The Asia InsurTech Podcast spoke with Dominique Roudaut, Head of Asia InsurTech Partnership and Innovation Solutions at HannoverRe, about the major trends in InsurTech, namely embedded insurance, parametric insurance, and becoming a risk partner.
Find the transcript of our conversation below:
Michael Waitze
Hi, this is Michael Waitze. And welcome back to the Asia InsurTech Podcast. This is the only podcast in Asia, focused on insurance that gives entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and investors a platform to discuss how technology is reshaping the insurance industry in Asia. Today, I am psyched to be joined by Dominique Roudaut, Head of Asia InsurTech Partnership and Innovation Solutions at HannoverRe. Dominique, it’s great to have you on the show. How are you doing?
Dominique Roudaut
I’m alright, thank you, Michael, thank you for having me.
Michael Waitze
It is my pleasure. I like when we do these things with the video included even though we’re not recording it, it’s just much better to be able to see the other person. So I appreciate you doing that as well. Before we jump into the main conversation, we like to ask people, what do you think is the biggest trend or maybe the biggest trends in insurance and InsurTech in Asia right now?
Dominique Roudaut
I think I have five trends or at least four and maybe the fifth one is related. But let me just make sure I have them. So the first one for me is, is embedded insurance. The point here with embedded insurance is we have to make sure the insurance is embedded in the customer journey with the end user. Otherwise it is one friction too much. You have to do your own thing, you buy your your travel or whatever it is, nobody wants to go on a website of an insurance company on top to do the the insurance purchase. So the idea really is to embed the insurance so where end users want to see it at a time they want to see it with the right solution at the right moment. So I think embedded insurance is the main trend. And the second one goes with it is parametric. Why is that? Because the whole point of embedded insurance is to make sure you are hassle free. And that’s the point of parametric insurance is to be hassle free, there’s no claims process. And that gets me to the third trend that would be typically insurance companies or reinsurance companies are risk taker. But if you really want to be hassle free, you’d have to be a risk partner. So you have to go beyond the just taking insurance to consider the use case for the end user with a 360 degrees. And that makes you a bit more of a risk partner. And that makes you a bit more involved in partnering with startups. So that would be another trend is partnering with other companies to be able to provide a better service. And that gives me maybe to the last trend, which would be anthropology. So every insurance company out there is very intent on big data. Right. And my point is, yeah, sure. HannoverRe as well is intent on big data, no issues with that. But Big Data is only half the story. Although it does tell us about correlation between this and that. But it doesn’t tell me why. And so I think anthropology is the all the way to understand why people behave the way they do is use a side of the story. And so big data can help us quantify the story that is told by the anthropology or ethnographic insight. I like giving you maybe this definition of anthropology that is not the textbook definition that it’s making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. So if we do that, we really understand why people behave that way.
Michael Waitze
So if you’re studying people’s behavior, I want to start sort of at the end, because in a way, it’s the answer that people least expected. And if you think about sort of complex human systems, and you watch the way people behave, I want to ask sort of a high level question first, do you see different types of behavior in different countries? I don’t want to go different regions yet, but we’re in Southeast Asia. And if you do, are there ways that insurance companies need to behave differently or act differently because of those different behaviors? Does that make sense?
Dominique Roudaut
So that makes sense. So yes, of course, in general, we cannot say that an Italian guy is the same as a Russian guy. But at the same time, we are all human beings as well. So I don’t want to spend too much emphasis on the fact that we are different. I think the point is, we may all want the same thing as human beings. But we may express that in different ways. And we may have value systems and we may value one thing compared to the other in order of priority if you want. And those subtle differences may make a difference in the way you want to position your product or the way you want to design it the way you want to pitch about it. You don’t talk the same way to 25 year old males and 55 year old females.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, and it’s interesting. I was having a conversation yesterday with a guy who runs a company called Aampe, really interesting. And the idea around this company is that messaging should be personal. Even if the message is personalized, even if the message itself is exactly the same, the wording, the syntax, the way things are said should be different. You know, one of the things that my grandfather said to me a long time ago was, “it doesn’t really matter what you say, it matters how you say it.”
Dominique Roudaut
Yeah. And so what I would say to that is, you may not remember what you’ve been told, but you will remember how you felt about it.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, exactly. So it’s kind of the same way of saying a different thing, just from the other side, right? It’s two sides of the same coin. Right. And the example that I gave yesterday was very pedestrian. And I’ll give the same example here without saying it. We have strong phraseology in English that we use that if we say those words can be really offensive, or they can be really celebratory. Again how you feel when it is said to you, right, I know what I’m talking about. Right? So interesting the way that works. And I think it’s the same thing in the insurance industry.
Dominique Roudaut
So it’s like “sick man”. So if you said that to an older generation first, what do you mean?Whereas in fact, for the younger generation, it’s good.
Michael Waitze
I mean, at least when I was in high school, I could say to my mom, that’s bad. And she’d be like, it’s not that bad. I’m like, Yeah, but that means good, never mind kind of thing.
Dominique Roudaut
So that’s exactly that. So yes, we were talking about pedestrian examples. But the point really is to truly understand the use case, as defined by the end user, not as the insurance company would phrase it. And so we’re not product centric, we may not be so risk centric, either, but more what am I trying to achieve as the end user? For instance, for motor insurance, every insurance company is intent on making sure that you have insurance when you drive your car, my point would be more to make sure how can I help you define what is the best way for you to go around today. Maybe your car is a better way to do that today for that very context at 6pm at night, when you go back from your office to your home, for instance. Maybe it’s not at that time, because of the weather conditions, because of road traffic conditions, because of whatever you may be better off taking a bus or a tube that is available to you. Or you may be better off waiting for half an hour before you take your car, because you will have a better journey. So I’m interested in that context. All those micro decisions we take all day long. And I’m interested in empowering end users to be able to do that.
Michael Waitze
So if you’re trying to build this user centric insurance, I think these things are combined, right? When you talk about embedded, yeah, maybe my wording is wrong. But I like to think of one of the words you just said as well, which is contextual. Like you said, if I’m going to get on an airplane and travel somewhere, if I’m gonna stay in a hotel, I don’t want to get there and then have to go to a website to buy hotel insurance. I want to have the option somehow to have that embedded contextually when I make the reservation, or as I’m getting on the plane, whatever it is, that makes my experience easier, not the distributors life easier, but makes my life easier. You talked I think you said there’s one more point of friction a word that I like to use a lot is frictionless. If I can remove friction from it, then it makes it more contextual. Or there other examples of this though, right, I was trying to think as you were talking about motor, where is the removal of friction and the contextuality? In motor insurance, is it the case that it’s sort of buy as you go insurance, or pay as you go? Does that remove friction, you know what I mean, as opposed to just you have a policy for a year, it’s always active. And if you never have an accident, you never have, you don’t I mean?
Dominique Roudaut
So it’s one way of doing that the point really, is to provide something that’s hyper personal for your lifestyle, the idea is to empower your lifestyle. And so if you are those kind of drivers that may use their car once in a while, having buy your car insurance for 365 days may not fit for you, right? And so but offering you an insurance, regardless of whatever means of transportation you may be using is more interesting for you. And so whatever you do, you jump from one way or the other, you will see the insured and eventually empower in making the right decision as to what is the best way to transport yourself today.
Michael Waitze
So when I look at when I look at cars, right, I look at a Tesla and some of the new sort of concept cars that I see where they just have these big screens, I think even looking at not an advertisement, but a review of a Ford Mustang. And I think it had some gigantic screens in it. Are insurance companies working, let’s just say with car manufacturers to build stuff into the onboard computers that will allow somebody not through sort of telematics per se, but to allow somebody to go I’m just about to go to the store, I want to be insured. And when they come home, to like just turn it off. I know that can be automated as well. But if it is interactive, I want to talk about that in a second. But is that possible to do? Is that being done?
Dominique Roudaut
So it’s possible, there’s no issues technology wise to do that. There’s no issue pricing wise in doing is that it’s more does it provide better value for the end user? Because I will be tired of having to click on the insurance every time I want to have an insurance. So that will be easier, we will have to balance the ease of buying insurance with portable insurance. And maybe sometimes it’s better just to be insured and not be so much into the details by the minute.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, fair enough. You also mentioned this idea of like communicating with the end users. And if you believe right, so it said to me, in some of the conversation I have about FinTech and some other stuff, like banking is something you do every day. But insurance, in a lot of cases is something you do maybe once or twice a year, if you’re lucky, maybe once a year, and never again until the year is over until you renew a policy. Are there ways if your end user centric, right? Are there ways to build pipes of engagement with your policy buyers or policyholders?
Dominique Roudaut
So that’s one of the things that I’m really making sure that we focus on at HannoverRe is to make sure we provide value on a daily basis, not just when you pay your premium once a year, and when you have a claim every once every five years. So how can I make sure the end user gets something out of the insurance on a daily basis? So there’s two things I can do, I can I can intervene before the claim and after the claim. So before the plan is more on what can I give you on a daily basis. And so here I can give you content I can give you education can give you prevention, input, all of that helps you to be empowered in your choices in what you’re going to do today. All of that may have an impact on your ratio, because it does change your behavior. And it probably helps you, as an end user, you get something out of the insurance. So that’s a valuable service, you don’t just pay for the plan that may or may not happen, you pay for the service you get on daily basis. And maybe you didn’t give an example here, we have, we have launched a personal cyber solution at HanoverRe. And so what we do here is we have the insurance already, what we didn’t have was a prevention services and the crisis assistance service. So we’re going to have all of that together, combined with our insurance. And if we have the pre-claim, the insurance and the post-claim, we cover the entire customer journey. And as the end user to go back to the user centricity. If what I want to have really when I buy insurance is not insurance, what I want to have is resilience. And so resilience can be answered powerfully by insurance. But it can also be answered by prevention, education, everything that can help me be empowered and eventually reduce my exposure. That’s why I wanted to have these prevention services in Cyber, because look at that, if I give you an example. So we have like millions of data being leaked. And we see that in the price in Japan, in Vietnam, in different territories in Asia over the past few years. So it’s common knowledge. And so your data is being leaked it means your data is potentially in the dark web. And so it means what does that mean for you as an as an individual? I remember, for instance, when I was working for a startup in commercial cyber, before pitching a very well known corporate client in Hong Kong, big company, that everybody knows, I checked on the dark web, what was exposure and fresh from the night before I had 800 credentials complete with passwords.
Michael Waitze
One second, I want to make this clear. So you were selling you were going to go sell a product or talk to a potential client about a product. And before you went there, you just said, so I can be prepared. Because there if I try to sell them cyber, they’ll say, Yeah, but we’re fine kind of thing. And knowing that they’re not, it’s relatively easy, you’re suggesting to just go onto the web and just check, basically. And you’re saying you were 800 records out there? Sorry, go ahead.
Dominique Roudaut
800 records, so login and passwords, and that for a company that has all the resources and processes infrastructure to ensure they have a robust security. So now go back to the personal cyber use case, go ahead. Imagine an individual you and me, we don’t have any of that. No, we may not be trained in how to be savvy around cybersecurity, so we don’t know anything about it. So our exposure is tenfold bigger, if not 100 fold. And so I wanted to make sure that in order to provide resilience and empower our end user, we give them a prevention service. And that prevention services, such as going to scan your laptop or your mobile phone is going to give you a score telling you how vulnerable you may be. And based on that it’s going to tell you what kind of action plan to improve your resilience. And its asked too much because I want to be user centric, because you may not be too savvy about updating your antivirus or firewall. It’s too much for you. You don’t have to deal with the details when you call the hotline and the hotline will do everything remotely for you. So good service hassle free and on top of that. I wanted to make sure that our prevention service also has dark web monitoring. Because if my password is already in the doc, well, I may believe that I’m safe add a password. But in fact, my password is already in the dark web so anyone can have access to it, and then have access to whatever accounts I may have. And so for me it was important to make sure our prevention service was comprehensive that it does have as well, some dark web monitoring, to do some stress reduction. Basically preempt before it’s too late.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, and look, there are equivalencies. I want to ask you more about this in a second. But if it’s true for cyber insurance, and that there’s prevention, and hotlines, and all this pre service and post servers you can do for cyber, the same thing must exist for health insurance, right? Because I should know like where my diabetes stands, I should know if I’m getting close to heart failure, all these things I can know. And if you can do the same pre service, like scan my body, make sure that I get the health checkup that I have. And we can talk about telemedicine in a second. And then sell me an insurance policy that’s relevant for that. And then afterwards, continuously check with me, this is the engagement that you were talking about. So that it’s not just I sold you the policy, you’re on your own, it’s I sold you the policy? Have you checked this? Have you checked that we’re getting this and out there, it says this and I know you went to the doctor last week, and here are some of the things that we learned about that. Of course, with my permission, you may want to just change the things you’re eating or check your blood glucose levels or all this stuff, right? It’s the same idea. No?
Dominique Roudaut
Exactly the same different use cases, same concept we just did, is just declining with different partners in different ways with different outcome in mind. But the objective is always the same. The objective is to empower the end user is to educate them to maybe do different choices, that may have an impact on their health exposure, which is good for the insurance company, which is good for the insured. And and then we try to improve the user experience. So those three things I have in mind every time we innovate, is it going to help the end user and not just help because it’s cheaper? Or maybe some new benefits or new service? No, it’s just does it help their lifestyle? So I have a service here for health insurance is I call that messaging telemedicine. So we all know telemedicine, you you have a video with a doctor. So I want to do something cheaper, faster. So you communicate with WhatsApp is a doctor. So you ask your question, you have your answer? Five minutes, you don’t. So the point with that is I wanted to rejuvenate our pool of insured. So that’s a good solution for younger people. It’s also a good solution for older people. There’s no reason why. And is good for anyone who doesn’t want to go around because long down whatever. But it gives you a better informed decision because it comes from a medical doctor that answer your very question. And it’s a real doctor answering. Is better than doing a symptom checker on Google. It gives you better, better service, better insight. And so that’s what I cared about. First, I provided a service to my end user. Second thing is I want to make sure those provided value for the insurance company and the reinsurer depends on that. So then what I like about it is you don’t have to go check with a medical doctor anymore, because you got the answer to your question. And in 70% of the cases, that’s good enough, you don’t need anything else. And then I don’t have to pay the claim because you went to the doctor. So it’s good for the insurance company. So to give you one example.
Michael Waitze
Does the doctor get paid for that kind of sort of quick consultation or they’re just happy… They do?
Dominique Roudaut
Yes, they get paid. Just they will get paid. Yes. They may not get paid as they would if they were to thing but the full thing but yeah, they use and we their time and expertise is being used and they get paid.
Michael Waitze
Okay, that’s great. And the third thing is?
Dominique Roudaut
So, um, so I was telling you about making sure that you provide value for the end user, yep, value for the insurer. And also value for any player in the value chain. In that case for health, you will be medical practitioners. So here we provide value for medical practitioners because we use and wage to make a living, maybe remotely. So that’s one thing, but also is now you’ve been to see a doctor and maybe like me, you you had expensive the fact that you had to wait for half an hour for them to sort out his insurance situation. Yeah, exactly. So it took me 10 minutes to talk to the doctor, but I have to wait for half an hour for my paperwork. So here I have another player who can help us and as a partner, we can really automate and digitize absolutely everything which is the insurance company and the medical practitioner. So we know exactly what the medical practitioner knows exactly what you’re insured. They don’t have to call anyone. It is a no doubt. And for whatever medical act is being rendered, we have a code for it. So then it’s good for the insurance company because then we can really see what is being done. We have the data and then we can compare what doctor charge compared to another doctor for this Send medical act. And that’s a way for us to fight against medical inflation, which is huge in Asia, it’s like 15% a year, don’t even justify as far as I can tell. So. So that’s a way then for the insurance company to decrease his insurance premium as value for the end user. So I want to make sure every time we innovate, that we create some virtuous loop between all the players, if we do that properly, we have a good innovation.
Michael Waitze
And is there a necessity, you must have great innovation if you’re doing those three things, right. And, I mean, there’s so many things to comment on, like in the last case here, where you’re saying, you want to make sure that the participants that all the participants in the value chain benefit, if you just take again, I like to simplify things, because it’s so much easier to understand. If I have to drive 30 minutes to see a doctor, right. And then I have to wait 30 minutes in the office because the the other appointments are stacked up, or someone’s appointment went too long. And if maybe the person who takes the receptionist is out that day, so all these things sort of come into play, it’s just very inefficient, as bad for everybody that’s in that chain. But if you just replace that, and again, I’m simplifying if there’s one patient, one doctor, one receptionist, right in one office, if you replace that with, because remember, that person’s one question can be something really simple, like, is this heart murmur gonna kill me? And the doctor can be like, no, that’s because you had too much coffee yesterday, again, simply simplifying it just to make the point. But instead of going all the way to the doctor, if you can solve that in like a three minute chat, the entire system is more efficient. The potential patient benefits right, the doctor benefits all these people benefit Sorry, go ahead.
Dominique Roudaut
And social security benefits as well. Because you have less people going, going to see the doctor. So it’s not a fit for every possible condition and every single question you may have, but it does provide better value. Because how many times you want worrying? I’m wondering about this, I’m wondering about that. It’s too much of a hassle. So I’m not going to check on it. Yeah, until it’s too late
Michael Waitze
All the time.
Dominique Roudaut
And so really what you have to then you you go. And so the ID mean, one, basically, the whole point in all of that, in the example you gave us exactly is important. That’s why we check, we check the customer journey, what do you have to do? And instead of an all of that is very fictional. So basically, you have to change your lifestyle, to cater to the fact you have to go see your doctor today is the ad for us is to empower the entire medical journey within your lifestyle. So it doesn’t disrupt it. So you can see get on with whatever you do, without having to change your plans.
Michael Waitze
Right. But how do you and this is something that I’ve learned over time, but I want to back up a little bit and ask you this question is when most individuals or let’s again, go back to this word, policyholders think about an insurance company, they think about the people that actually sold them the policy, maybe the person that’s distributed to them, and they may not even know that behind that as a reinsurer. Right. What you’re suggesting is that Hannover re itself is so deeply involved in what that end user policyholder experience is, is there a way to let people know that that is it important to you, as well to let people know that that’s actually happening that not just the person that sold you the policy, but this other infrastructure in the background that you may not have heard of is also involved? Is there brand building going on there as well? Or am I just not aware of that at this stage?
Dominique Roudaut
So we’re not too precious about our brand. Being arrangements company will always need an insurance company. And what I want to make sure that we don’t confuse the end user. Right. So who’s never heard of it? So better than mentioned anyway? Got it. And so now on the b2b side, yes, I want to be known by distributors. I want to be known by insurance. So they can find us? Yes, that I want to do but for the end users, they know absolutely. There’s no need for them to know anything. You
Michael Waitze
got it. Okay, I want to get to the relationship between, because I think it’s scale, that there are two types of clients that a reinsurance company has, if you just think of it a super high level, one is the end user, we’ve already spent some time talking about that. I want to talk about the insurance companies, because that’s another client of a reinsurance company for sure, which you just intimated. But I want to back up for a second and talk about just this big category of financial literacy. Right? In other words, just telling people what finance and the financial products mean, how do you approach that? So that we can start to solve some of the sort of penetration and product understanding problems as well as that part of this engagement that you were talking about before?
Dominique Roudaut
It is true. So here I’m my answer would be more towards b2b sale. And so if I’m going to talk to a distributor, let’s say, Amazon, for instance, what do they know when we’re insurance? That’s not the business you know nothing about. And so if I am going to sell something to Amazon, I’m going to have what I want to avoid is to have to talk to the guy that deals with insurance. Go ahead, because that individual He’s not part of the strategy of the company, he’s not part of the memenangi. So cookies are not the marketing strategy of the company. He’s only there to buy insurance, it means he is not incentivized to be user centric is not incentivized to be innovative. Got it. And it means for Amazon insurance is only a source of revenue. Right? It’s it’s salary is not political strategy. So it can be dealt with some insurance. Executive, my point would be to, in order to, to attract those distributors to speak the language. So I would start by what is your strategy? What do you care about? What do you want to achieve? And then I will see how can I provide you a solution that contains insurance that helps you fulfill your strategic goals? For instance, if I want to talk to a telco, every telco is the same to me, I don’t quite distinguish one from the other, for my for my Wi Fi, or whatever it could be for my network. But now, if if I am a telco My problem is how can I differentiate from my other 10? competitors? We always say we are commoditized. How can I differentiate? So what if I were to give them an insurance solution that helps them differentiate from all the others, that helps them retain their customers that helps them maybe improve in the market share for some segment of the population? How can I do that? Thanks to insurance. So my answer here is to give them an insurance that say, if your network is down, it’s honest, we apologize. We’ll give you some money for that.
Michael Waitze
And is this where we started talking about parametric insurance? In other words, exactly, because, because that’s a thing that can be known. It can be measured, it can be checked, there are indices that follow these things, where maybe does parametric insurance come in. And for some of the people that are listening who may not know what that is, maybe you can define it, and then show where that’s different from indemnity insurance in this particular case.
Dominique Roudaut
And so, um, parametric insurance would be referring to a third party index to define if the claim has been met, if it’s an insured claim, so the most typical index would be a typhoon category five. So if you have a typhoon, category five crossing your zip code, you get the money you have. And so the corollary of that is that as an insured, you have nothing to do no paperwork, you don’t have to file any claim, we know, because we refer to an index an outside party information that tells us that the insurance trigger has been met. And some of my short definition for the lemon would be hassle free insurance, you have nothing to do we know the risk has been met, we pay you right away.
Michael Waitze
But how do I know my payouts gonna be? Right? I know I’m gonna get something but how do I know what it is.
Dominique Roudaut
So when you buy your insurance contract, you decide to sell ensure you’re going to have, and so that when the the trigger is met, that’s what you get.
Michael Waitze
So it’s just pre determined, predetermined. So now that’s really hassle free. Because one of the problems one of the issues that comes up with claims is, well, this is worth $1,000. But I only want to pay you 575 kind of thing. And it’s like, well, I can’t replace it for that. And such a hassle nonsense, right?
Dominique Roudaut
Such a hassle, especially for low value amounts. Don’t go through that it costs too much money for the insurance company as well. So what’s the point is, we don’t provide a bit of good value here, we’re going to so every time I had to claim myself, every time every single time I had a claim it was declined on insurance company, for you. Exactly. And I am a professional know, How upsetting is that?
Michael Waitze
Do they know who you are?
Dominique Roudaut
I say, Do you know who I am? I talked to my claims guy. And they told me they wouldn’t pay the claim while declaring my claim. And so terrible experience. So the best insurance experience is when you don’t have to deal with it. That’s what we promise with index insurance.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, I mean, it’s like going to a cyclical restaurant ordering pizza, have the guy come in back and go, and you’re only going to get six slices. It’s like, I want eight. That’s why I ordered the pizza anyway, we spent a lot of time talking about the way you deal with your sort of end users. Can we talk a little bit about the strategy for dealing with the insurance side? Now it’s your other? It’s your other group of clientele for a reinsurer? How is that? So
Dominique Roudaut
before I get jumping to that I would like to conclude on the end user, I would say as a bonus for us in order to be user centric is to provide experiences. And maybe one last example for that, please. If your flight is being disrupted, delayed, cancelled. We all have that experience. So if your flight is canceled, you have to queue another 400 people at the desk of the airline.
Michael Waitze
I’ve done it, we’ve all done it right. What a nightmare.
Dominique Roudaut
So real life experience. Let’s use that to improve the experience of the end user. So my point here we have a solution for that I went live two months ago, is I know your flight has been disrupted because I am connected to all the airlines information. I send you an SMS within two minutes to tell you I know your flight has been too Rapid I call you back within 15. I call you back within 15 to call you and say, okay, so I apologize for the disruption can fix you access to the launch, I can fix your systems and explain or I can fix you stay at your hotel overnight if you have to. Meanwhile, you have 400 people queuing and see if this was the airline, whereas you are taken care of by your insurance company, the amazing service, you got something out of it. And then on top of that, you have no paperwork to fill for planes, because we know the disruption, so we pay you right away,
Michael Waitze
You can see me smiling. So that’s a great user experience, right? So I’m just imagining, because this has happened to me so many times when I was at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, I mean, how many times a year was on a plane and how many times was later disturbed or distracted, or whatever. And the thought of having to get back in line, because I’m thinking in my head as you’re talking, what should the process be like, I get an SMS, it says, Don’t worry, we know your flights been delayed or canceled, we’re taking care of it. Two minutes later, I get a pass like some digital pass with a barcode on it, that gets me into the business class lounge, even though I’m flying economy class. The third thing I get is, we’ve re booked your flight. And you’re sitting in seat a three because we know you like to sit there, just be at the gate. 30 minutes beforehand, your gates changed from a 17 to you know, to G 15. Enjoy your trip to New York. And then you’re watching everybody standing in line and just thinking
Dominique Roudaut
That’s what I call empowerment, you are empowered in your lifestyle, we help you live your life, we don’t disrupt it.
Michael Waitze
Yeah. And no paperwork, because that’s the perfect example. Right? Because it’s something with which everybody can identify everybody’s been in that situation.
Dominique Roudaut
And so that to do that we have to become anthropologists. We have to check how people behave when they have such issues. And so what are the pain points? How can we fix it? So that led me to conclude on the end users? Now to answer your question, how do we engage insurance? So I would say we have three clients, in fact, and users, insurers and direct distributors, we will always need an insurer in between. So there’s no debate around that. But what I’ve noticed is that our user centric story, tend to be better perceived or valued by distributors. Why is that because they are facing customers. So they understand the importance of user centricity that sometimes insurance company may not quite get. So therefore, we want to talk to the arbitration committees, ourselves, we will always need an insurance company. But we don’t have to wait for the Insurance Committee to give us a deal. We can do everything with our partner decision partner. And then once everything is agreed, we’re going to give the business an insurer. And so that’s what the user centricity that is common to between the end user and distribution for the insurer, because they may not value so much, maybe today, and it is going to change, not everybody is the same, but they may not quite maybe anticipate the importance of this user centricity. We provide solution for their specific use cases. And so an insurance company tend to think in terms of p&l, top line, bottom line expenses in between, how can I improve all of that? And so that’s how we, we engage them. So what I like to do is, with everyone is to give, I want to give first, yeah, I gave it for free. And so then we like each other eventually. But we provide value in the process. So what do I give in the first place, I give a bi for business information tool for free. Okay, I give a dashboard to insurance companies. So if they give me data, I will give them access to the dashboard, that will tell them everything they need to know about their program, top line, bottom line, frequency, severity, trends, anything by product by benefit by distribution, they have properties that give us information, they will see it in the dashboard, and they don’t have to pay for it. It wouldn’t work for them. So why do that, like do that? Why do I believe in that is I pioneer digital transformation at ciarb. With that, exactly that when I joined Chubbs, he told me all this is a learning company. And then I said great, show me his opinion by benefit. We don’t have that product, or we don’t have that either. What do you have? We have a aggregation of p&l is really for financial reporting. So that financial company that’s not underwriting company. So let’s work on the issue I had when I was in Europe, Australia, for instance, is the robo guys would give me one set of numbers. Yeah, original actuaries will give you another set of numbers, meaning between what who do I trust? How do I make a decision? And so I changed that for first of all everybody would have to send to and so this is why we rolled out our bi is that we designed ourselves as underwriters, we didn’t wait on it to do that because then it wouldn’t work. Now that’s what’s let’s go into business garage or shadow it. So the business does it itself. Because it’s the it does it is going to take twice as long cost twice as much and deliver twice as less. That’s the root of it is insurance companies and so we do the Got it, we as a business, we own it. So we design the solution ourselves, then I impose it to everyone. actuaries, underwriters, everybody has the same tools, we have the same version of the truth,
Michael Waitze
Right, then everyone’s looking at the same view on the same
Dominique Roudaut
Exactly. And then once we have finally, the insight I should have had 25 years ago, I can make decisions, I can really be clever. That’s what we give to our insurance companies, we can give you all the insight you need. So when we look at it for renewal, we can tell exactly why is turnings away trends we can, there is such benefit on such populations, that may be the issue. So therefore, instead of just racking up the insurance claim by 15%, for lack of imagination, we can just change the walling or the pricing for that population specifically. So we don’t have to disturb the water program, we can do so much more granular, and we brought value to everyone in the process. So that’s the first thing we like to do is to give tools for free in exchange, we get data out of it. That data is useful for the insurance company. It’s also useful for the reinsurance company because we can learn out of it.
And so then what do we want to learn out of it. So of course, the first data says that every insurance company would get is anything around the p&l for underwriting inaccurate data. So that’s in the realm of C underwriters and actuaries the old fashioned insurance companies. This is managed, driven by underwriters and actuaries. But once we have those data, and we add to it more, so every other data we can get from any possible source, IoT, whatever it could be, then we get into the big data, debate or environment. And that’s a realm of the data scientist. So out of the data, I can find some correlation. And I may be able to find through the data that in fact is your 25 year old and you buy a red car, you’re more likely to have an accident than if you buy the white car, which which is not part of our underwriting criteria. today. Now we we price your motor insurance based on age, gender, location, the type of cars and make and model and power eventually and things like that. We never asked for the color of the car, but maybe thanks for the data, we may be able to learn those, some correlations that could be of interest, right. And so that’s a such a thing for us. If we have the data, we can get into micro segmentation, leading to propensity and sensitivity but doesn’t mean propensity is the likelihood of someone to buy insurance so we can cross sell upsell better. And sensitivity needs as the right price. Some people may be more elastic to pricings, and others. And so we can maybe stretch as a price accordingly. And making sure we we charge the best price for the best product at the best time. So that’s all about big data. But that’s still not enough. Everybody does big data. So what’s the differentiation? 403. We do big data just like anyone else. My goal is to get into thick data. So what is thick data? So I see you smiling. so thick data was coined by a professor of anthropology in 1973. Before gills and so what he said is, we can infer meaning thanks to context scenarios situation. Yep. And he was using the example of if I do that right now, so people can see us but I did the week, Yuliya, or maybe was a twitch. knows, right. So data scientists will be the same thing that have an eyelid for felt apologies, the Twitch is meaningless. We don’t care about that. But wink has so many different meanings depending on the context. Yeah,
Michael Waitze
exactly. The same. This gets back to one of the things we were talking about before, right. It’s not what you say that matters. It’s how you say it. It’s like, I can do this, like all day, and it doesn’t mean anything except maybe there’s some sand in my eye. But if I do this, now it means something.
Dominique Roudaut
So then the context will tell me if it is a joke is it’s you being seductive, it’s you showing that we both have an understanding of the situation. Right, right, right. It’s just like, yeah, so many different meanings, right? And so big data, allied with the data for me, there’s a two phase of the same reality. So if we add the two together, we understand so much more the end user. And so from there, we can better understand what would they like to have, right? Instead of just doing trial and errors, which is the way we proceed with the data is the data in first some correlation. Let’s do some testing to see if it works. And you test a new test and you test so it’s kind of a wasteful endeavor. Whereas if I go one obtain octave Lauer, I understand deeper the reason why this data says what it says the person as wrongs as a context was going on exactly. In those helped me to be a bit more precise, and a bit more deliberate as to what I’m trying to achieve here. Right. So this is where the end user centricity. And so the entrepreneurship trend I was telling you before, GM goes back to how can I provide value for insurance companies that may not even know we do some of apology here, right. But he will help us better analyzing the data. So we don’t have to tell them, we ought to apologize, they don’t care so much about it, they only care about the outcome. So the outcome would be a better story. And so a better decision being taken out. Got it. So that’s one way we work. So then after that, they will try to design a services solution that are valuable for the end user, but also for the insurance company. So this is where we get into the optimization, optimization of sales optimization of claims. And here what I like to do, you were asking me before, what trends no, yes, there’s plenty of trends around claims optimization, and how can we do that? So but my point here is, what I like to do is, I don’t like to follow trends so much, because then I’m not going to be innovative, to be doing anything different. So I may have to catch up. Yeah, sure. But I may not be leading the pack. So how can I lead these back here? So what I like to do is look at oza Industries, and whatever solutions may be using, how can I apply that to my use case insurance? So I have a specific example here, we have launched two weeks ago, a solution for triage in your claims through voice technology.
And so that’s the technology that is already has been used for the past 25 years by different forces, notably in the USA, once they go to Afghanistan. And they have to hire local people for driving, translating cooking food, how can they make a difference between a friendly local is going to cook that food and the potential suicide bomba
Michael Waitze
Right? or someone’s gonna poison their food? How do you prevent it? Is it just lending the country two minutes ago?
Dominique Roudaut
They know nothing? And no one know how can they tell? They use voice technology. And so we use the same technology ways to the claims to help triage the claims. So it does help you pay your claims faster, while still making sure that you can spot the ones you shouldn’t be paying.
Michael Waitze
So fraud detection as well?
Dominique Roudaut
Yeah. And so that’s, that’s thanks to a technology that does exist that has been used for the past 45 years, but may not be so prevalent in the insurance business. And so we basically divert its usage, but he’s the same tech.
Michael Waitze
Yeah. And this is interesting, right? Because I asked a lot of people in the insurance in the insure tech space, you know, if you’re building applications that are customer facing, are your comps, or comparisons, only other insurance companies? Or is it every other consumer facing application? And the answer I get is always the same and corroborated. And that is, I’m definitely not competing at the end user space with just other insurance companies. I’m competing with every best in class consumer facing app. And it’s the same thing if you can take those things, and then aggregate them into an add them into that insurance experience. Whether it’s for the policyholders or for the distributors, or for the insurance companies, then you’re doing something that’s differentiated. The idea for talking about what the trends are, is not to say that people should follow them, it’s just to get a framework of understanding and I know you know, this, just about where things stand the things about which people are thinking not to say like, everybody needs to do that. But that that’s what’s happening in the market now. And again, you want to like you said, if you’re optimizing, and you want to be better and leading the pack, well then you have to do things that are different you can’t just do the same thing but do it 4% better, nobody cares.
Dominique Roudaut
Yeah, and that goes back to what I was saying before but embedded insurance is making sure we provide the customer journey that is the best possible frictionless as much as possible. And so so many players you may buy your insurance online but your claims it goes back to the same process it takes a month right so if I can have this automated technology with everything flows to the triage to the vote technology, I can tell right away that claim should be paid right now because there’s no reason why not absolutely no trace of assign of fraud here or and then you can pay them quickly. And for the 10% of them that may be telling a different story, then you can have your your people investigating a bit further.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, exactly. And look, it’s really the last experience you have that you’re going to remember the most or and again, I like to simplify things to make it easy. If I go into a restaurant and have just killer service by the waiter and waitress have the best bottle of wine the most amazing food like a paradigm changing dessert, and on my way out like the doorman trips me, I’m not gonna go back.
Dominique Roudaut
The paradigm changing dessert sounds good.
Michael Waitze
I’m wondering why could that be? So mine, I’ve got me thinking. I’m thinking some kind of creme brulee actually. Anyway, look. This has been an unbelievable discussion. We’re going to have to get you back because there’s more to go through. But I want to let you go. This was awesome. Dominique Roudaut, Head of Asia InsurTech Partnership and Innovation Solutions at HannoverRe. That was awesome.
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