The importance of experience and automation are nothing new for Frederic Glorieux, the Senior Director of Underwriting and New Business at iA Financial Group. But with insurance companies all focusing on driving easier-to-use and better high-tech for their clients and advisors, the skill sets needed to boost a firm’s expertise is hard to find.
“The strategies we need are becoming more and more important,” said Glorieux. “We need people with more experience, but the consequence is the market is really tight for these kinds of people. This is one of the challenges we have to face that’s not unusual for us and that’s a big trend in the market right now.”
Lack of underwriters
Underwriting has been cited as one of the areas in the North American insurance industry where the talent market is stretched right now. So iA Financial has designed its own clear career path for those who want to join and stay on, said Glorieux.
“There is not just one recipe; there are different solutions to the issue.”
For example, iA has designed a career path for current employees to help them increase their expertise, he said. It’s also split the underwriters into teams where senior underwriters show the junior employees the ropes.
“The idea is to be able to support employees to help them grow and that’s key for us.” - Frederic Glorieux
It also ensures that those interested in automation have a certain amount of focus and expertise to help speed up the increasing need and use of technology, said Glorieux. Underwriting, for example, requires people who can follow medical research and know how to translate this into the underwriting process.
“The idea is to be able to support employees to help them grow and that’s key for us. It’s the reason we have the strongest team, including management, because we cannot rely just on outside experts.”
Attracting talent
Strong expertise, in conjunction with project management software Workbench, also translates into supporting employees and determining the next-best trend. “We are on the right track. My team is not struggling, not hampering growth – quite the opposite – we are supporting growth. The good news is we are able to attract new talent even though the market is tight.”
Glorieux also gave the example of a senior underwriter who left iA for another job only to come back a month later because she had to write down everything in a long and complex process rather than use the iA software and she felt she wasn’t being as efficient.
“We are the exception in the market right now [to have Workbench]. We are always trying to find the right balance between automation on the one hand and helping our team and supporting our team.”
Glorieux said iA has made more improvements in the past two years thanks to the software than it did in the previous decade. “We are building the future. We have to continue hiring new and talented people [and] … we want to be sure that our employees are happy working every day.”
Defining customer experience
Alex Watson, the Canadian Insurance Lead at management technology consultancy Capco, told a recent LIMRA conference that moving forward technologically is a major development for the industry, one that will define customer experience and help figure out where digital fits in with advisors.
COVID-19 was the shove the industry needed to move it away from the likes of wet signatures to e-signatures and beyond. Now the industry is moving forward technologically in ways it hasn’t done before so those interested need to be responsive to the market in a way it hasn’t been able to do before.
Also crucial is to ensure that the multiple needs of clients are met (like insurance and investments) and to take a product-agnostic approach to servicing claims, said Watson.
“This is an evolution.”