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The winners of the Efma-Accenture Innovation in Insurance Awards 2021 have been announced! My congratulations to all the entrants, and particularly those that made it to the finals and scooped awards—your innovations are setting the pace in the insurance industry. The Product & Service Innovation Award category winner, Bâloise Luxembourg for Drive Electric, and runners-up Plymouth and Moonshot-Insurance are breaking new ground.

It’s been an exciting run-up to the awards, with 460 entries from 289 organizations across 55 countries competing for recognition. In the Product & Service Innovation Award category, the entries have been particularly interesting. Each entry was assessed using three criteria: originality, strategic capacity to generate long-term competitive edge and return on investment, and adaptability for use in other markets and countries. The winning innovations illustrate the mindset and capabilities insurers will need to create solutions for a new kind of customer—one that demands more—in an exponentially more competitive, ecosystem-driven arena.

Bâloise certainly deserves applause for its win. Electric vehicles, right now, make up about 10.5 percent of new car sales in Europe. By 2030, this is expected to grow to 30 percent. But buying electric can be intimidating when there are so many unknowns. In addition to insuring electric vehicles, Drive Electric, through strategic partnerships, provides key value-add services to help customers make the switch to electric. This includes assistance to set up a charging station at home, a card that gives drivers access to 180,000 recharging stations across Europe, and an app that lets a user see all the charging stations on his or her route.

Bâloise calls its approach being ‘client obsessed’—going beyond insurance to find ways to simplify the lives of clients. With Drive Electric, Bâloise not only extends its core offering into a new area, it sets itself up to ‘own’ a larger part of the value chain in an emerging area of opportunity.

Finding the right partners was a challenge. Said Cedric Rochet, Bâloise’s Chief Innovation Officer, in the Award pitch sessions: “Once we had identified pain points, we needed to find the right partners. We found a local partner with a strategy to renew and expand its services. It was a matter of synergy but also trust—these partners had proven solutions and legitimacy in the market.”

I believe Bâloise will play a pivotal role in facilitating the ownership of electric vehicles, shaping ‘drive electric’ insurance and service provision. Their move into this segment illustrates the opportunity that is emerging for insurers to play a convening role in creating new solutions that truly add value to the customer.

Home insurance like never before

Winning Silver in the Awards segment is Plymouth Rock Assurance for its @Home product innovation. @Home is a fast and easy way to insure a home or rental. It does away with what can be a complex, lengthy assessment process based on subjective or inaccurate data, by making use of advanced enabling technologies. The @Home enabling technology is built on massive amounts of data sourced from publicly available databases, cutting-edge predictive modeling techniques, and machine learning. This enables homeowners to receive quotes in seconds, and purchase policies rapidly.

While many insurers have improved their products and efficiency by making better use of data, Plymouth takes it a step further, improving the customer experience.  “Thinking out-of-the-box about how someone who knows nothing about insurance ‘experiences’ the purchase of our product, we were able to come up with the easiest possible experience and build everything – pricing, product design, service delivery, distribution, compensation – around it,” says the company.

Since launching @Home, Plymouth Rock’s new policy quotes have increased tenfold and sales have increased by 65 percent. It’s the kind of innovation leading insurers are applying to legacy products as they transform, using advanced technologies to add value to clients.

The moonshot win

Bronze in this category went to Moonshot-Insurance for its “Any-cause flight cancellation” automatized processing innovation. Moonshot is an insurtech launched five years ago to develop new products suited to a digital world (for e-commerce platforms, online digital travel agencies and banks) with a specific focus on customer experience. Its Any-cause flight cancellation solution it is changing the way travelers think about insurance.

The product makes a simple promise: We will refund the cancellation of a flight without exemption and without receipts! Thanks to real-time updates on flight plans and disruptions, Moonshot Insurance can notify customers immediately when their flight is cancelled. The insured is guaranteed to be notified and compensated in event of cancellation of their flight, whatever the cause. And it is super simple to sign up—for cover, the user simply goes onto his or her banking app and registers their flight. When the claim is made, compensation is prompt—no proof is required.

I believe the pandemic and its impact on travel will drive demand for travel insurance. Moonshot-Insurance brings a proactive solution to the market that sets new standards. They are pioneering new solutions with new technologies that help consumers manage risk simply and easily—and the high-value customer experience provides significant differentiation.

More innovation

Other very worthy nominees in the category included Ping An for its Ping An One-click Auto Insurance Claims Solution, Beazley for its Reputational Risk Insurance and WAKAM for its “Theft of valuable items” embedded insurance.

These innovations are indicative of what is to come in the insurance sector. The change in terms of how carriers are ideating and designing and rolling out insurance products and services are significant. These are new products for a digital world and digital customers.

Please note that you will need to register to view these Efma-Accenture Innovation in Insurance Awards 2021 entry submissions on the Efma site. Well worth it!

View the full Efma-Accenture Innovation in Insurance winners announcement here.

Get inspired. View the 2021 insurance innovation library here.

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