CUSTOMER PATHWAYS: PARTNERSHIPS
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Simon Bentholm, Chief Customer Officer of Penni.io, explains why digital partnerships are key to the new insurance distribution model “We still hear, now and then, insurance companies saying ‘are we sure that consumers are interested in taking this insurance digitally?’,” says Simon Bentholm, chief customer officer of insurtech Penni.io. It must be difficult to know how to respond to that, given evidence of consumer demand for digital financial
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TheInsurtechMagazine | Issue 7
services has been staring the industry in the face for a while now. According to findings from the EY Global Insurance Consumer Survey, while only 28 per cent of consumers in Europe favoured digital contact with their agents before 2020, that increased to 43 per cent during the pandemic. And, most telling perhaps – insurance being, historically, a product sought by an older demographic – 65 per cent of 45- to 64-year-olds said they would now happily use an app to manage their policy. “We have an industry that for 20 years has been enacting a self-fulfilling prophecy, thinking that the end user does not want to interact with them digitally,” says Bentholm. “They then
make poor solutions which the customer does not want.” He believes that, as the consumer knowledge gap in technology dissolves, and more services are enabled online, digital selling is an imperative. And, according to Penni.io’s most recent Embedded Insurance Index, customers don’t just want to purchase products digitally – they don’t even want to have to go looking for them. Embedded insurance has been a frenzied topic of debate among insurers for a while now, but consumers are perhaps better acquainted with it than they’re given credit for. After all, from British Airways to Ryanair, the travel industry has been offering insurance, ffnews.com
