Three Ways to Build a Competitive Advantage with Technology
By Keith Hector, Commercial Director, Covéa Insurance.
Ask anyone in this market where competitive advantage comes from and you'll get a familiar list. Scale. Structure. Distribution. Underwriting knowledge. All of it still matters. But something else has started to move ahead of it, and it's changing how strategies get written.
Your advantage is already sitting in your own data
What's coming to the fore is the intelligence you already hold. The quality of your own book, how well you understand it, and how quickly you can move when you spot a trend. That's becoming a genuine point of difference.
The interesting part is who it's available to. This isn't vested in the larger players. It sits right across the market, and it sits with distributors as much as it does with insurers. Data is increasingly playing a part that means strategies are changing, capability is changing, and the whole outlook for competitive advantage is changing with it.
Go looking for proprietary technology
Proprietary is a really interesting word, and I don't think we use it carefully enough.
There's been an explosion of technology driven by AI. Underwriter workbenches, ingestion technology, triage, pricing that adapts around the data insights you've got and presents them to underwriters. We've talked about insurtech for a long time, particularly in commercial lines, but that tended to sit around the fringes and in supplier relationships. This is different. It's in the middle of the business now.
Here's the thing though. A lot of people have spent a lot of money on that technology and it hasn't paid the dividends they wanted. So they're going round the loop again.
That's why proprietary matters. Where are the technologies that are actually winning, becoming deployed, becoming real, being used by more and more insurers? When a company like Covéa chooses to invest, we want to know we'll get the return, rather than take first mover status and never realise the benefit.
Four questions, really. Is it proven? Is it working? Is it deployed? And can I trust it?
Make people your competitive advantage
It's always been said that this industry is all about people. Every business says it. I'll have been in the industry 40 years next year, and I've heard it throughout.
Of course, AI and agentic AI begin to challenge that, and there are genuine differences of opinion. I go to conferences where people ask why we need people at all, because agentic AI will do everything.
I don't buy it, and neither do plenty of others. There will be a distrust of technology. There will be a need for human interaction that goes on for many years yet. And there's a regulatory backdrop to think about, including how agentic AI complies with the regime the regulator is setting, whether it can be trusted, and whether it can genuinely replace some of the things we do. The integrity of that human interaction has to remain a key part of the process.
But there's no doubt about the direction of travel. The administration, the analytical work, the leg work that takes up so much time now will shrink, and shrink, and shrink.
Which is rather the point. It means our underwriters, our negotiators and the people looking after clients get to spend more of their time doing a better job.
