Antony Elliott, is Chairman at B3i and Group Head of Business Transformation at Zurich Insurance.  In this podcast we discussed innovation in the insurance industry, blockchain as part of the new stack, but also what he feels were the lessons learnt at B3i and what his aspirations are for it. 

At Zurich Insurance, Antony is focused on making the organization more effective, efficient and customer centric. As he suggests, his role at B3i has a similar focus except at an industry-level. Thus, his dual roles allow him the ability to drive transformation at a group and industry-level; an opportunity few have!

 

What is blockchain?

According to Antony, blockchain is a tamper proof protocol that allows information to be shared across a distributed platform. From an insurance perspective, blockchain permits better allocation of capital to risks by allowing mutually distrusting parties to be part of the same network and extract benefits from referring to a single source of truth.

 

B3i from Antony’s perspective

B3i began as an industry roundtable to discuss blockchain and was eventually incorporated as a company in 2018 which is owned by seventeen insurance companies. The wider B3i community consists of 40 insurance entities including primary insurers, brokers and reinsurers. It's mantra is for the market by the market. The aim at B3i is to build protocols, standards and infrastructure to remove friction in risk transfer in order to better allocate capital to risks.

 

Antony’s journey

Passionate about transforming the insurance industry inside and outside of Zurich insurance.

Antony was introduced to the insurance industry during his early days on the graduate scheme at PwC back in 1999. His initial experience with insurance was in PwC’s assurance practices which involved audits and consultancy work.

He believed then (and does till date) that insurance is a social good. However, he continues to believe that there are ways to make insurance better for customers. Antony’s LinkedIn handle summarizes his vision as “passionate about transforming the insurance industry inside and outside of Zurich insurance.”

 

Innovation in insurance

Antony points out that the insurance industry has made substantial progress with regards to innovation over the past 5 years. The focus on innovation is gradually shifting from the product side to becoming centered around the customer. Antony makes an interesting remark that “line of business” (a phrase widely used in insurance companies) bears no relevance to the customer!

As of June 2019, Zurich has created the role of Chief Customer Officer - Conny Kalcher was recently appointed to this position. This role may be viewed as that of a customer advocate within the organization. Another area that the insurance industry is improving is with a focus on innovation and engagement with startups. In general insurance is pretty good at developing proof of concepts but have a harder time at scaling innovation. Zurich is attempting to do it differently and Antony proceeds to highlight some examples of incumbent engagement with technology recently. In particular, he mentions Zurich’s acquisition of Bright Box in December 2017. Bright Box focused on telematics for OEMs which augmented Zurich’s effort in the telematics-based motor insurance category. In March 2019, Zurich