InsureTech Connect Vegas is a wrap for 2024. It again leaves all attendees both energized and exhausted as thousands of insurance industry leaders convened to connect, learn, and test their minimum sleep requirements.
My first ITC in 2021 was also the return to in-person events for many after the pandemic lockdown. It was also the inaugural kickoff summit for Group Tech Connect to reinforce, along with Sureify’s Life and Annuity event, that ITC was not solely for the P&C segment of the insurance industry.
Fast forward a few years to 2024. Sureify’s L&A Summit featured several tracks hosted by vendors and carriers. It also included ITC LATAM, ITC Brokers, and the new addition, ITC Agents. A dedicated expo space accompanied each series of thought leadership sessions.
As I perused the ITC Brokers and Agents agendas (while running from meeting to meeting), I found many topics of interest. At first, that caught me by surprise, based on my carrier roots. Then, I reminded myself that the insurance ecosystem is founded on partnerships – between carriers and agents, brokers, MGAs, technology vendors, and service providers.
What is the foundation of a strong partnership? Random Acts of Leadership™ distills it to three components:
1) A clear and compelling shared future.
2) A commitment to the others’ success and satisfaction.
3) Trust in each other’s commitment to #1 and #2.
A clear shared future
A shared future means no part of the insurance ecosystem is in it alone. To turn this risk into a strength, each partner must see the bigger picture. They need to understand not just where they meet, but also what leads to and follows each interaction.
Each partner must understand each other’s constraints and pressures to consciously avoid exacerbating them versus inadvertently increasing their magnitude. Measures of success should be defined together to prevent goals from being misaligned if not conflicting.
Mutual commitment to success
Commitment to each other’s success and satisfaction requires understanding, as mentioned above, and empathy. It comes with a mindset that all (including the customer) win when we pull together in the same direction.
At the significant measures of industry success – sales, renewals, satisfaction – carriers, brokers, and agents come together with the same outcome in mind. Appreciating day-to-day operations leaves little (actually no) time for partners to job shadow to understand a day at each other’s desks. Communication becomes crucial in understanding how each partner can avoid creating friction for the other.
Trust among partners
Trust is the foundation of a successful partnership. And as the anonymous saying goes, it takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair. I believe the protection and service core to the insurance industry’s purpose positions most to trust initially versus holding back with skepticism.
ITC Vegas: Looking ahead
Looking ahead to next year, I hope ITC Vegas 2025 will create more forums designed to bring together different insurance ecosystem partners. Not only hold hands, but grasp each other at the elbows. Not all leaders have held roles across multiple types of organizations and can understandably have blind spots on the actual reason a process does not flow easily end-to-end. The resulting misunderstandings can erode the trust that must be protected.
Sessions that offer a 360-degree view of processes where one or more partners feel they have blind spots could foster new insights and different conversations.
- How might we transform differently, better, together if unintentional walls were removed?
- Could both cost and frustration be avoided if stakeholders had more transparency on the challenges each other faces, which could create unintended work upstream or downstream?
- Would we gain new insights on customer expectations, and what a consistent end-to-end experience should really look and feel like?
- What insights and inspiration could we gain by looking for opportunities for the L&A and P&C segments to learn from each other’s lessons and successes?
- Might more industrywide conversations expand how each part of the ecosystem thinks about its talent strategies, and individuals see many more potential rungs on their own career jungle gym?
As ITC continues to expand its reach, let’s not miss the opportunity for the entire insurance industry to connect with each other.
