(Posted by Guest Blogger Dan Dolberger)
Is something beginning to stir in the insurance industry’s rock-solid public image as the most boring industry on earth? Is it the sound of spontaneous discussion, hot argument and honest exchange coming out over the media? Are insurers finally actually permitting themselves to seem, not just be, passionate about what they do? “Insurance panel discussions are usually fairly mundane and predictable affairs”, writes National Underwriter’s Sam Friedman in a recent post on his View from The press Box, “but in what might be the first real burst of spontaneity in the history of such events, the members of one panel stood up to publicly challenge the assertions of those on a subsequent gathering, with regulators and insurers going at it during the recent Joint Industry Forum. It was one of the most honest and productive exchanges I have ever seen between the two sides. I just wish there were more like it.”
WOW. Regulators and insurers going at each other in public. Allstate CEO Thomas Wilson calling the regulatory environment “so arcane you can’t get anything done.” And ACE CEO Evan Greenberg calling the NICA “broken” and “antiquated.” And NAIC President Sandy Praeger getting up to respond rather apologetically: “We’re…taking a very hard look at the way we develop models and in a sense set ourselves up to fail…”.
In a nice coincidence, Claire Wilkinson of the iii recently reported in her Terms and Conditions blog on the launch of sexyinsurance.com – claimed by its producers Dynamia Interactive to be the world’s first social network for the insurance industry. Even in a world where close to 100,000 domains are registered each day, I bet Dynamia didn’t have to bid too much on the purchase of this patent contradiction in terms. True to its name, the site ignites the audience’s passions on a seductive orange background color, with a photo of Warren Buffet and a superimposed “I’m so sexy it hurts” blurb.
My My.
But to unruffle our clothes and remove the lipstick smears, combined with some very encouraging news on the adoption of Enterprise Decision Management Technologies by insurance companies during 2007, some signs of lasting change are beginning to appear in this Industry’s ways of self expression, thought and workflow. In this sense, “Sexy Insurance” may be more than the name of a new social network. In the hyper-comptitive world of today’s financial services, being attractive is often about surviving, and managing to be attractive in this sense means being able to constantly innovate on your products and the way you price them. The US Insurance industry knows only so well what it means to push upwards for product and pricing innovation on the regulatory system’s steep and somewhat antiquated slope.
An old joke defines Actuary as a place where they bury dead actors. Judging by the sounds, it may be time to bury this joke.
