P&C companies must have systems in place to meet customers’ current, future demands: Paquette

The move to digitalize will be important for those in Canada’s property and casualty insurance industry looking to position themselves well for the future, Sylvie Paquette, senior vice president and general manager of p&c insurance at Desjardins Group, noted during a recent interview with Canadian Underwriter.

“Your expectation as customers is not driven by your experience in p&c,” Paquette said following a Desjardins event in downtown Toronto. “It’s driven by your experience with Amazon, with Google, with how you buy a dress over the web, how you travel,” she said.

“Customer expectations are so high compared to what the p&c industry is able to deliver” at this point in time, Paquette suggested.

Whether in banking, on the broker side or an exclusive agent, she said everyone agrees that timely response must be available to customers in whatever forms they want: by mobile device, via online, by phone or in person.

But not only must the response be available, there needs to be an integration so a customer does not need to repeat information if the mode selected happens to change, she emphasized.

That said, not a lot of organizations are “ready for the merge of all the technology: web, mobile, tablet,” she suggested. Getting to the fuller integration that will undoubtedly be necessary in future demands being able to invest and develop networks that can handle current and future demands.

“For us at Desjardins and for most companies, the architecture of the systems that we have right now, we cannot build upon that,” Paquette said.

With its recently closed acquisition of State Farm Canada’s operations, Paquette said that Desjardins is looking to the future even as integration from that transaction continues.

State Farm in the United States is investing $450 million in preferred shares in Desjardins’ Canadian p&c organization and both sides are contributing to ensuring the necessary integration of systems.

“What we are buying in Canada with State Farm, it’s not a stand-alone organization; it’s a branch. So we have to unplug one system at a time and plug it to the platform of the agents,” a process that Paquette said will likely take two and a half years to complete. “And after that, we have to replace the agents system, because it’s the U.S. system,” she said.

“At the same time we’re integrating State Farm, we’re changing completely all of our platforms for the core insurance business and we are continuing to invest in telematics,” Paquette reported.

The new architecture of the system that the company is moving towards will be more modular. “Will it last the next 50 years? No, but we will be able to build on that,” she said.

“The system is the brain, the intelligence that you’re putting into it, but it’s a lot more than that,” Paquette suggested, adding it is also about “how you use everything around it.”

For systems to meet developing demands, “you don’t just need money; you don’t just need IT. You need talent, you need analytical skill.”