Two insurance CEO’s share their vision about the future
Tom De Troch, CEO of Fédérale Assurance, and Frédéric Van der Schueren, CEO of Belfius Insurance, were guest speakers at the DECAVI CEO Event (18th edition).
The biggest challenges for the insurance industry remain climate change, geopolitical instability and the digital transition.
1. The first question concerned the social commitment of insurers
- Frédéric Van der Schueren confirmed the importance of this commitment and explained its multiple levels to the 90 participants. He wants to have an impact on each of these levels through an active policy. The first level is to be present in the different stages of the insured's life by offering a better quality of life, housing and care. Promoting sustainability is another level. "Belfius Insurance offers, for example, discounts to owners of energy-efficient homes. We can also make a difference to society through our investments and our diversity and inclusion policy."
- Tom De Troch recognized the importance of prevention and positive incentives as part of the societal role filled by the insurer. Fédérale Insurance is part of this perspective with "investments that stimulate the greening of infrastructures". But also through good governance. "We are leading by example in this regard and have already come a long way, especially through our program that helps young people start up their own business. We need to keep insurance affordable and risk insurable”, Tom De Troch reiterated repeatedly.
2. A second question related to digitalization
"Many insurers are focusing on customer interaction by working with chatbots. We made the choice to start by getting our internal processes in order”, Tom De Troch pointed out. "The data warehousing and acceptance environment is now in the cloud. As for the migration of the production environment, that will happen soon. We are using data analytics to identify patterns in claim settlements and automate them. This makes our work more efficient and we can develop more customized products. But the use of artificial intelligence is still quite limited”.
Thanks to its ability to identify risk more and more accurately, Belfius Insurance is now able to offer dynamic pricing in order to provide the most correct price possible. "If we want to run our business soundly, we need to automate processes. We are making sure that as many claims as possible are handled automatically by robots”, revealed Frederic Van der Schueren. However, he also cautioned against real-time in-depth risk analysis and its real-time calculation: "We can analyze driving habits, but imposing pricing based on that analysis does not guarantee commercial success”.
