A guiding light in a changing landscape

As insurers increasingly leverage technology, the role of reinsurers can be to advise and guide as well as to offer financial support and capital, Simon Wigzell of UnipolRe told Baden-Baden Today.

Against a backdrop of an increasingly complex and changing landscape with great geopolitical and demographic changes, new technology is transforming the insurance industry. The best reinsurers will have the expertise to work alongside their clients to leverage these changes to their advantage.

That is the view of Simon Wigzell, underwriting manager, UnipolRe, who told Baden-Baden Today that as buying habits in the insurance sector change, this represents a fantastic opportunity for insurers but also a considerable challenge in some ways.

“The customer’s needs and buying habits are evolving and that means the nature of the product is changing too,” Wigzell said.

“The reinsurance industry needs to ensure it too has a deep understanding of these changes as they will also change the nature of the risks reinsurers are taking on.

“Since reinsurers see a much broader scope of these types of risk and often have much deeper resources than their clients, they can obtain a position of expertise whereby they can advise clients on the best way of structuring products and their wider portfolio.”

Valuable relationships
UnipolRe is owned by Italian insurer UnipolSai Assicurazioni, one of Italy’s biggest insurers. It has invested heavily in recent years in a number of forms of technology and now has deep expertise in areas such as telematics and a number of emerging technologies around health insurance.

This has allowed its reinsurance arm, based in Dublin, to tap into this expertise to help its clients develop better products and achieve greater insight into their own portfolios especially on motor portfolios, an area where UnipolSai Assicurazioni is a world leader in the technology it is using.

Now, Wigzell said, UnipolRe wants to extend this logic further and work with its clients across a wider range of new technologies as well working with insurtech startups, especially those connected to or backed by a larger insurer. He said a reinsurer with the right expertise can offer much to such a relationship.

“It is very important these products are engineered correctly, especially when they are uniquely tailored to the consumer.

“While they can be fantastic for the client, they are not necessarily easy to make money from because the risk is so closely aligned to the specific lifestyle of that person. Equally, the nature of the risk is changing constantly,” he explained.

He stressed that because the footprint of reinsurers is so much wider than that of their clients, they have greater access to insights and data.

“We are a very modern company with huge resources at our disposal to assist clients. The expertise in our parent company, because of the heavy investments it has made in technology, means that we can help them develop products for a new generation.”

Health insurance is a big pillar of the parent company, which Wigzell describes as very sophisticated in terms of the way it approaches this line of business and is using some technologies.

From digital watches that monitor every aspect of a person’s health and fitness to offering discounts on insurance premiums where a client has gym membership, an array of innovations is happening in this space, which insurers are tapping into.

“Insurers are developing a wide range of products that can help differentiate the premium side and offer customers a more bespoke insurance product,” he said.

“We are there to discuss product design and help cedants understand the implications of this for their own portfolios.

“The other area of growth is developing ways of cross-selling different forms of insurance to consumers using technology, each uniquely designed for that person.”

He noted that while some insurers are developing such innovations themselves, many others are partnering with insurtech companies to leverage these benefits. UnipolRe, he said, is open to working with such companies to offer both expertise and capital.

“We are open to writing business on this basis,” he said. “We can offer experience and also critical mass in terms of our balance sheet.

“We understand that each such venture is different, some are leveraging new sales channels and wider distribution by capturing and gathering data on their clients.

“We believe we can offer much to these companies and we would like to speak with them.”

Simon Wigzell is the underwriting manager at UnipolRe. He can be contacted at:  simon.wigzell@unipolre.com