Strategy Definition & Review

A well-defined strategy is crucial in today’s insurance industry. Not only does it provide clear direction for the business, it also generates greater confidence in business plans, risk assessment and capital implications.

Our knowledge of the insurance sector enables us to provide strategic advice for the whole business, for entering new markets, or for specific areas of the business such as distribution, products and pricing.

Business Strategy

We believe that to be successful, a strategy should be:

• Logical, coherent and based on sound principles
• Supported by rigorous analysis of market, company and competitor data
• Financially modelled, tested and justified
• Practical and realistic, recognising the scale of development required
• Defined in real-world business terms to be readily grasped, supported and implemented.

A well-defined business strategy requires a blend of skills and expertise: strategic, financial and operational. We can deploy specialists in each of these areas to create a balanced perspective on the strategic challenges faced by the insurance industry. Our working style is collaborative and flexible, to provide the level and type of support appropriate to your needs, whether it is to drive the strategy development, to conduct a full strategic review, to act as an external challenge and sounding-board or simply to review with you the outcome of your own internal processes.

New Market Entry 

Significant value can be added to a company from moving into new markets, such as:
• taking existing products to new sectors or territories
• offering new products to the existing customer base
• using existing competitive advantages to move into adjacent markets

Market expansion can provide earnings in its own right, improve retention, generate increased return on ‘spare’ capital and enhance customer relationships. A clear understanding of the key drivers for expansion is critical to defining appropriate success criteria and ensuring objective measurement and evaluation. Our approach uses these principles to develop a customer-focused market entry strategy with clear goals to maximise the chance of success and reduce the risk of failure. Within this process, it is important to consider the overall value chain to identify which key elements will provide the earnings required and the role of partnerships in the business model.

Business Area Strategy

Within the context of the overall business strategy, individual business areas and functions can benefit greatly from developing a more detailed strategy that focuses on their own specific challenges. Many organisations will also need to revisit elements of their business strategy from time to time, without necessarily carrying out a complete strategic review. For instance:

• Distribution: The distribution landscape has been changing over the last few years for both personal and commercial lines businesses. Regulation, broker consolidation, the internet and brand / affinity marketing have all changed the way insurance is bought and sold for large segments of the market. Our experience across all these areas makes us well-placed to offer impartial and practical advice to help develop a distribution strategy that plays to the company’s strengths within a realistic market context.

• Products and pricing: In many sections of the general insurance industry, product innovation and pricing sophistication can be an important part of driving profitable sales growth. The search for competitive advantage is increasingly blurring the lines between product distribution and manufacture, increasing the use of partnerships and complicating the value chain. Working alongside EMB’s actuarial teams, our strategy specialists can help to deal with these broader issues and enable innovative solutions to be developed and implemented.