Blog by Ant Middle

Blog by Ant Middle | Ageas UK Chief Executive Officer

What rising to the challenge really means for brokers

If your BIBA Conference 2023 was anything like mine, you’ll still be basking in the afterglow of having spent two days discussing genuinely exciting opportunities with broker partners – as well as catching up with friends in the industry. 

At Ageas, understanding people is the first building block of our strategic purpose “Understand People + Simplify Insurance”, and by this we mean really getting to know our customers and the people we work with. What I really value about the conference is the time it affords for us to simply be together with those close to our customers, to listen, to understand, and to act. If something matters to our broker partners, then it matters to me. 

A common theme of this year’s conference was unsurprisingly linked to the trading environment. Our strategy is to provide long term sustainable pricing to our brokers, no shocks and no surprises, and I was pleased to hear that our approach has been warmly received. Over the last year, using our long-term pricing view, we saw an emerging issue linked to inflation levels and took early action. This work is far from ‘done’ given the continuing challenges ahead, but you can be assured we will continue to work hard to provide the consistency we know our broker partners and clients value. 

Another theme was the implementation of Consumer Duty and there was a resounding recognition that this new requirement introduces a higher standard of consumer protection, ensuring we always put customers’ needs first to deliver good outcomes. 

I strongly welcome its introduction. The principles behind it act as a further endorsement of our ingrained customer-first culture. My comfort is driven by the valuable work we have already been doing as part of our “Ageas Care” vulnerable customer programme and the brilliant expertise and enthusiasm we have in the business to meet the requirements. 

We’re in a good place - but what about those in the industry who can’t call upon a team of experts? Well, Consumer Duty is a joint endeavour between insurers who manufacture the products, and brokers who distribute the products to customers. 

Without the joint enterprise of brokers and insurers we cannot understand the full customer experience and their desired financial outcomes. We have acted on this understanding proactively by not only providing brokers with access to our regulatory-required product value statements, but also given them an overview of the considerations they may wish to make through our full product assessments (as published on our website). We’ve found that brokers need as much information as possible, and they want to know we’ve got things covered at our end. So, we released our very own ‘Guide to Consumer Duty’ – the what, when and why, leading anyone who needs it through the requirements step by step.

And this is not a one and done exercise. We all need to ensure we are fully meeting the requirement of good outcomes for customers. We need to continually learn from their experiences and evolve our oversight through their feedback, data, tools and other capabilities. We’re now immersing ourselves in this learning and will continue to explore and share these findings with our broker partners as Consumer Duty, and indeed our always-on commitment to customers, inevitably evolves.    

Like all change, market challenges and new regulation such as Consumer Duty may seem daunting – but, as per the appropriate theme of this year’s BIBA Conference, together we will rise to the challenge.