In my last post on Behavioral Finance in Retirement Planning I ended with the question ‘Are you on the bandwagon yet?’. If you are not, then may-be you are infected by the ‘procrastination’ virus that most of your consumers are infected with. One of the biggest barriers to consumers saving more for retirement is procrastination. [...]
[Co-authored with Mudit Mathur, Nidhi Rustagi, Sundeep Thakkar, and Amaresh Tripathy] Recently we posted a story around the future of commercial insurance segments and how the dynamics of small commercial segment is playing out differently from that of mid-market commercial segments. To put it succinctly, the pitch around small commercial segment is that of efficiency [...]
Continue reading about Market and Agent Performance Toolset for Insurance Companies
[Co-authored with Nirav Bhagat and Punita Gandhi] With close to 9 million views, the YouTube video “United Breaks Guitars” was one of the more significant internet memes of 2009 (1). United Airlines severely damaged the neck of David Carroll’s Taylor guitar while unloading his baggage. After a fruitless attempt to obtain compensation from United Airlines, [...]
Continue reading about The 3 S’s of Social Media in Insurance – Sense-Share-Serve
On June 29th Allianz Global Investors announced the creation of a Behavioral Finance Center appointing Professor Shlomo Benartzi as the Chief Behavioral Economist of the Center. The press release claimed that “… the Center is an extension of Allianz Global Investors’ continued commitment to provide financial advisors, investors and plan sponsors with helpful information and [...]
[Co-authored with Marie Carr] Case Study: Legacy Insurance International Eight months ago, Debra Regnis, President of Legacy Insurance International, completed a four-month business strategy to revamp the company’s strategic direction. It was the first initiative of its kind for the company since she could remember, and she had been at the company for 25 years. [...]
Continue reading about Roadblock #1: Failure to Articulate Your Strategy
Micro-insurance can offer insurers the potential to contribute significantly to their top and bottom lines. Below are perspectives on micro-insurance based on Diamond’s experience in emerging markets like India. What is Micro-insurance? Micro-insurance aims to protect the assets of low-income individuals and families from natural disasters, illness, death, accidents, crop failure, etc., enabling them to [...]
Continue reading about Micro-insurance: An untapped opportunity in emerging markets
[Co-authored with Hank Hillebrand, Tom Kavanaugh, and Jamie Yoder] In April of 2009, Consumers performed 137.2 million financial need-based search queries compared to only 16.6 million product and brand based queries. What does this tell us? By looking into Consumers’ online search behavior, one can see that broader need-based searches capture significantly more attention than product-based [...]
[Co-authored with Marie Carr and Jamie Yoder] A strategy can define a destination but it won’t get you where you need to go. It takes strong leadership with focused vision to effectively guide an organization along its journey toward profitable and sustainable growth. Unfortunately, most insurers are not prepared to overcome the roadblocks that stand [...]
Continue reading about Hindering Success: Six Roadblocks to Putting Business Strategy into Action
[Co-authored with John Sviokla and Jamie Yoder] One of the most important things that executives forget when they craft their service model is the need to address customers’ anxieties. In today’s grim environment, this is more important than ever for all companies but especially for financial services firms. Since the financial crisis of September 2008, [...]
Continue reading about Are You Catering to your Customers’ Anxieties?
[Co-authored with Marik Brockman] We frequently hear consumers are increasingly embracing the Web for researching and purchasing all kinds of products – including insurance products that were often considered ‘sold’ by agents or advisors versus having been ‘bought’ by consumers. According to Celent, Web “influenced” life insurance purchases will rise from over 40% in 2008 [...]
