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In this episode, Georgie Simister welcomes industry thought leader Tony Tarquini to discuss the crucial human element in the age of Insurtech. Tony, who named his company 5189 Limited after his 400m hurdles personal best, argues that talent, relationships, and culture make or break the industry - not technology.
Creators and Guests
What is Insurance Technology: Fact or Fiction??
Host Georgie Simister speaks with key insurance industry figures to separate fact from fiction in a world of insurance, debunk industry myths and explore the game-changing innovations shaping its future.
Get in touch to suggest our next guest: https://artificial.io/contact/
Everyone's talking about technology in insurance and it's the premise of this podcast really. But let's be honest, it's the people who make or break this industry. Talent, relationships, culture, that's where the real change happens. So today, we'll be driving into the people element of change. Welcome to Insurance Technology, Fact or Fiction with Artificial hosted by me, Georgie Simister.
Georgie:This is the podcast that separates fact from fiction in the world of insurance, debunks industry myths, and explores game changing innovation shaping its future. Today, I am joined by fantastic Tony Tarquini. So Tony is a respected thought leader, advisor and a speaker in the insurance, IT and consulting space. A former national athlete, he applied competitive lessons from sports to build a high profile consulting career, co authoring the best selling Insurtech book and winning awards for IT innovation. With degrees from the University of Dundee, Insted and Henley, he has spoken at conferences for over thirty five years and is regularly quoted in the insurance and national media.
Georgie:Known for his engaging insights, Tony shares thought leadership on his platforms like LinkedIn, sparking debate and offering a clear perspective on the insurance market challenges and the opportunities. On today's episode, we will cover how to attract people into the industry, how to manage them through change, and working out what the role is for the future. So, Tony, thank you very much for being here today. Welcome to the studio.
Tony:Well, thank you very much for inviting me.
Georgie:No worries at all. So we met a couple of months back at an underwriting event, didn't we?
Tony:We did indeed.
Georgie:And you had, well, you were moderating a few of the panels there.
Tony:I was.
Georgie:And then you had the pleasure of sitting next to me at dinner where I chewed Jorio off probably for a long time about the podcast. And then, yeah, we decided it was a great opportunity to have you on on the podcast.
Tony:Yeah. It was a lot of great idea, and I'm I'm very pleased to be here.
Georgie:Perfect. So I found this story very interesting. I would love for you to share the background behind your company name. I think it's a really great story.
Tony:Right. Okay. Well, it's a question I get asked quite regularly. I mean, particularly when I'm at a conference and people look at my my lanyard and Yeah. It's at fifty one eighty nine Limited.
Tony:The question I always get asked, is that Lloyd's syndicate then?
Georgie:That's what I thought it was.
Tony:Everybody thinks that, but it's actually not. My company name is explained this way. I left corporate life about four years ago, started up my own small consultancy. And when you go to choose a name for a consultancy business, all the good names have gone. There's a 100,000, a million people before you who've just soaked up all the good names.
Tony:So I started casting around, so what am I gonna call my business? So I decided to make it something very personal to me and to what the business does. And basically I do two things. One, I moderate at conferences, which is where we met. And would you believe there is an insurance conference somewhere in Europe every two weeks?
Tony:There's a lot of, lot of conferences and webinars and whatever. So I do a lot of that. But also after thirty five years of working with a number of tech vendors selling into the insurance industry, I realized that insurance technology companies don't do it well. Conversations between Insurtech salespeople in particular and insurance executives go really badly. So a lot of what I do is to help those companies to articulate better their go to market and what they're all about and why they can solve business problems.
Tony:So casting around thinking about my company name, I started thinking, well, actually it's all about the resources you've got. So there are about 20 criteria that you have. It's about time, geography, quality of product, your sales and marketing ability, and about 20 or so other things. And given the resources you've got, how do you achieve the best result and the best outcome? And it occurred to me, it's very much like my athletics days.
Tony:I'm a short, fat Italian. I was competing against, I mean, literally the best people in the world, Olympic champions, world record holders. And during my day, there was a guy called Edwin Moses who didn't lose a race for 122 consecutive races, nine years, nine months, and nine days of unbeaten across the world. But he was six foot four, a thirty six inches inside leg. He could get both of his feet behind the back of his head.
Georgie:How do you know this? I think that's maybe I got
Tony:to know this guy, right? So I am not foot three six foot three. I do not have an inside leg version of thirty six inches. I can't run forty five seconds for the 400 meters, but I had other resources. So you have to look at all of those things to think about the right outcome.
Tony:And, ultimately, the best outcome for me was when I ran my personal best. It was in a race against the guy who went on that year to become the the Olympic bronze medalist, a guy called Gary Oaks, and I ran fifty one point eight nine seconds for the 400 meter hurdles. So that's why I call it fifty one eighty nine.
Georgie:Yeah. I think that is a very brilliant and personal story. So today, we're here to talk about the people side of change. So let's talk about first, you know, there's quite a prevalent topic right now that there is a talent shortage within the industry. Is it really that bad or is the industry just bad at selling itself to new talent?
Tony:So, you know, I think the industry is very bad at selling itself to new talent and to the world generally. I think our marketing is pretty awful. When I'm at conferences, very often I ask the audience as a sort of impromptu question, how many people in this room, and it can be 200, 300, 400 people, how many grew up wanting to be in the insurance industry? Now I've gotta tell you, there's always one person at the back, put their hand up. Really my question also should then be, and I'm sure you had a relative who was in the insurance industry and got you into it.
Tony:And they go, Yeah. So growing up cold, wanting to be in the insurance industry, nobody does it. And that's a shame really, because people do aspire to do other jobs. I once came across a guy who said he aspired to be in the insurance industry because when he was at school, somebody came around and did a talk. They were from brokerage and that broker insured Manchester United.
Tony:And he was a fan of Manchester United. And he thought, Okay, I'd like to be a broker in the insurance industry, placing the insurance for Manchester United's players. And that's what he ended up doing. Not for Manchester United, but he ended up being a broker. And he loved it.
Tony:And he said, that's what inspired me, a good story. And I don't think we tell those stories well enough.
Georgie:Why do you think then the younger generation aren't naturally drawn to insurance careers?
Tony:Well, I think there's two reasons. It's the reputation of the industry. And I think they're also uninformed about the industry. I'll tell you a little story, which is I have three sons. My middle son is insurance.
Tony:He hates me telling you the story, but I'm gonna tell it to you anyway. He came out of university with a politics degree. He was sitting in our kitchen and I said, So what are you gonna do with the rest of your life? I think you do really well in insurance. And he classically said to me, I would rather stick needles in my eyes than work in something as boring as insurance.
Tony:So I'll take that as a no then. Yeah. What are you gonna do? He said, Well, I want to do a gap year. So fine.
Tony:Okay. I've paid for you through university. I'm not gonna pay you through your gap year. Go and get a job. So he cast around for a job, looking for a job.
Tony:He ended up working for an insurance broker on the high street. Okay. So he did that for a year or so, got enough money, went off and did his gap year, came back, sitting on exactly the same stool in the kitchen. So what are you gonna do with the rest of your life? And he said, Well, I wouldn't wanna be a high street broker necessarily, but I would like to be an underwriter.
Tony:Long story short, he ended up being on the box in Lloyd's of London, underwriting terrorism and political violence risks. And he now lives out in Asia and he runs part of the Asia Pac book for a tier one insurer in Hong Kong. So I regularly remind him of that. But that is that uninformed part of the whole thing and the reputational part. I was talking to somebody the other day and they said to me, I've placed my insurance with an insurance company who is gonna pay out.
Tony:I said, What do you mean? They said, Well, their strapline is they pay 98% of all claims. And I said, Most insurers will pay valid claims. They have a perception out in the world that they don't pay enough claims. So that insurer's saying 98%.
Tony:That's actually a bad thing because about 10% of all claims are fraudulent, whether that's completely fraudulent through organised crime, or they're a genuine claim, but they've been exaggerated. So if they're paying out 98%, 8% of that is probably going to criminals. So are you happy to pay for criminals being able to milk this company because they're paying out such high levels of claims? And he said, I never thought about it like that. I said, Well, you do need to think about it like because that's The reputation is insurers don't pay.
Tony:But actually, if you've got a valid claim, 99.9999999% of the time they will pay. So I think we have this reputational issue and I think we have this uninformed issue.
Georgie:Mhmm. But then if there is a talent shortage, why are people now thinking that AI is gonna take their job? Like, why are we so like, people need to encourage more people to come into this industry. Everyone's talking about it. You've got a large proportion of people leaving.
Georgie:So why is everyone fearful that AI is coming for their job?
Tony:So there's no doubt that AI is going to remove a lot of the tedious work, the simple, the repetitive, the number crunching, data and text analysis, all that kind of thing. But if you look at the way that data and AI is likely to be used, there's a stack, You start with data, and data's great. But just with data, you can't do anything with just data. You've got to do something with it. You have to analyze it.
Tony:So the next step is to do the analysis. But the analysis is no good if you don't get insight. And insight's no good unless you make a decision as a result of that insight. And frankly, the decision's no good unless you actually take action. And from the action, making sure that you review it, and then you go back down to the data again, and you start going up.
Tony:And that's the truth, whether you're looking at underwriting a policy, processing a claim, or you're the CEO looking at strategy. Everybody does it the same way. There is no doubt that AI is very good at the analysis work. Number crunching, taking huge amounts of data, and doing the analysis on that is really what AI is very, very good at. And humans just cannot do it to the same scale.
Tony:So let's accept that. It's starting to get to the level where it can move up and starting to provide some insight, depending on the quality of the AI that you're talking about. But still, that's still a part of the human domain. Making decisions, whereas I think we're still, the humans are still in the loop on that one and taking action. Yeah.
Tony:Now, agentic AI for very simple situations is starting to be talked about, starting to be implemented. And yes, those agentic AI capabilities will remove some of the work that's gotta be done. But there will always be a necessity for having a human in the loop. And I don't mean a human in the loop being somebody on Friday when they want to get out to the pub because it's quarter to five going, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, to all the things that they've been put in front of them without looking at it. I mean, genuine human in the loop.
Tony:We're moving to a knowledge based industry. We've been that for a long time, but we're moving more and more towards that. And that's gonna be combining both corporate knowledge and individual experience. And I think where the jobs are gonna be are in that individual experience level. A lot of the knowledge that's always been passed from generation to generation is now being put into corporate knowledge within AI systems.
Tony:My fear is how do you get the individual knowledge when all the corporate knowledge is being put into databases and AI systems? I fear for the youngsters coming into the industry, how do they get that experience? And I think that's something we do need to think about.
Georgie:But insurance needs bias, doesn't it? Because that's in a way, because that's how you can make your decisions. I know everybody's trying to streamline it and maybe take the biased out of it. But if you are a talented broker or an underwriter, you know how to work that that risk to make it look the most attractive. So
Tony:That's the human in the loop.
Georgie:That that is. That's where their their knowledge is going to come come in. And I, like, I agree about the younger perspective. How are they going to get that that knowledge with the way that we're currently working? And I think that leads me on on nicely to my next question, like, about relationships.
Georgie:Yep. Insurance is such a relationship heavy industry. Like, it's I think it's most people's favorite part about the industry is how relationship heavy it is. How do you think that's being impacted with automation, digital claims and even like remote working? Like what does that mean for the relationships, like relationship networking now?
Tony:Yeah. So I've been in this industry thirty five years or so, and I've seen a lot of changes in it. People have always said, Oh, that's gonna change relationships. That's gonna change relationships. That's gonna change relationships.
Tony:I remember email. When email came, everybody's, Oh, that's it. It's the end of relationships. Everybody's gonna sit at the keyboards. They're gonna be sending emails to each other.
Tony:No, it hasn't. Other technology workflow, that's gonna get No, it hasn't changed it. Lloyd's employees not being able to drink at lunchtime, that's gonna kill it. It hasn't killed it. They drink at 05:00 instead.
Tony:The industry and people find a way because they understand what the value of those relationships are. I think it's really important that organizations do understand that and put that as part of their digital strategy, that they facilitate ways for individuals to establish those relationships, not in a forced way, but enabling it to happen in a way that the individuals themselves will like it. To be honest with you, very few people come into this industry, work for the same company all of their life and then retire. There are a few, but they're very So you establish a relationship with somebody working for one company. You don't then kill that relationship because you've moved somewhere else.
Tony:You take that relationship with you. Everybody does the same thing. And that's the way the industry works. And I think that's gonna continue.
Georgie:Mhmm. And then so if we're gonna talk about change and rolling out kind of the big programs, when a big program is rolled out, why is it usually the human side that's underestimated?
Tony:Well, I think a lot of that is down to the fact that organisations and leadership concentrate on the easy things. There are three things that you can change: systems, processes and people. There's nothing else to change, right? So systems are nice and easy. Put a new IT in there.
Tony:Processes, yeah, that's tangible as well. Let's work out a new process to do something. And maybe using IT in a different way to make it more efficient and more effective in automating it or whatever. The people bit, that's where it all becomes tricky. They go, Oh, organizational change.
Tony:Let's change the way we report and it's changed the structure of the organization. That's tangible as well. So they can, that's nice and easy to do. But the more difficult bit, the intangible bit is the people bit because it's unpredictable and it's diverse.
Georgie:As people tend to be.
Tony:Absolutely. And if you're only doing a top down change program, this is the way it's gonna be. We're gonna put new system in, we're gonna have new processes and you're all gonna love it, push down. It doesn't work. You've also got to do bottom up.
Tony:And I think one of the things that I've always felt was really, really important is for organizations to understand what's called the emotional journey of change. It's well documented in psychological circles. And it basically starts at the beginning. Everybody gets really excited. We're going to do this change program.
Tony:It's gonna be wonderful, fantastic. And they have this ramp up of excitement. And then it all starts to happen and they go into a big dip. And then you come out of the dip and hopefully it doesn't just carry on down and you fail, but it comes out of the dip and goes up and up and up and up. So the narrative that happens, which is something along these lines, Oh, interesting.
Tony:We've got a new change program happening. What's it going to do? It's going to be great. It's going to do this. Oh, it's going be fantastic.
Tony:Wonderful. Oh, does that mean I've got to change? Oh, I don't know that I feel comfortable with what I'm doing. I don't want to do things differently. Oh, Oh, somebody else is doing it.
Tony:Oh, it looks interesting. How are they? They're responding quite well. Let me have a look at that. Oh, let me try it out.
Tony:Actually, this is not too bad, is it? I really like this. Oh, great. This is fantastic. I never want to go back to the way we were before.
Tony:And so it goes on. So that's the emotional journey of change. There are actually four of them and they're all out of sync. There's the emotional journey of change. They're all basically the same structure, but they're all at different times.
Tony:So the leadership have one journey of change. The change management team who are doing this, they have another one. Middle management have another and the staff have a fourth one. And they're all out of sync. So what's really important is being able to address the behavioral change of the people who are being changed at the appropriate times, particularly in that dip, to make sure that they come out of the dip and they go up to make you happy.
Tony:And I think the company cultural change is a result of individuals' behavioral change. So if all the individuals behave in a different way, the culture changes, and that's when you get emotional buy in and you get cultural buy in to a program. But you've gotta do that bottom up. You've gotta concentrate on people to be able to do that.
Georgie:I was sat next to a girl, I went on a course and she's in the business change department at an insurer. And I was like, why don't you just mandate everything?
Tony:Does it work that way?
Georgie:My wishful thinking and selfishly, I'm like, yeah, just mandate these IT systems, like that will work well for me. She's like, no, like we just we can't do that. And then through talking to her and seeing it in practice, I completely get why. Like, it is all about the hearts and minds of people, and they can make or break an opportunity.
Tony:Absolutely. And and the politics around change are massive. People will always look after themselves, the fear and the distrust that goes with change programmes, particularly if you've had a lot of change and you're getting tired of it, or you've had failed change programs and everybody's a little bit, Well, I'm not entirely sure whether this one's gonna work out as well. And let's be honest about it, in the London market, there have been a lot of failures. So there's a lot of distrust of whether new initiatives are going to succeed.
Tony:So, yeah, that individual trust level is is really important.
Georgie:That's one of the things that we come up against when we're bought in and we're having a conversation. There is a lot of the change fatigue, the burnout, and they're like, what makes you different? You know, we've been part of the the different initiative. We put all this effort in and then it didn't go anywhere. So that is like a real challenge for us that we need to bring people on the journey, get their buy in and make them feel part of the process.
Tony:Absolutely. Mhmm. Yep. So so important.
Georgie:Yeah. Lindsay, that was really great insight. So thank you for that. But so if we were to look at a change program that you've seen, have you seen any projects that have failed not because of the tech, but because the people element wasn't handled well?
Tony:People don't tend to talk about the failures. I've seen a few failures at a company level with clients. On the whole, I think they tend not to fail per se. They don't achieve what they set out to achieve, but they'll be implemented and they'll come out. It's very rare that things get canceled because you're spending a lot of money.
Tony:You have to get something out of it. I do remember, however, working with one organization, this was a change program that was being done within my own company. I was hired into this organization in the South Of England to look after an acquisition that had been made fairly recently. And the organization was predominantly based up in the North Of England. Immediately, there was a North South thing going on.
Tony:So the bulk of the business-
Georgie:We have a North South divide here. The
Tony:guys up in the North, they had the existing product, which was very sort of niche, and it did what it did extremely well, but it couldn't really be expanded out. My role was to expand the whole thing further using this product and this company that had been achieved. There were only four guys working on this thing in the South, but it was very comprehensive and actually a really good product that it would work with what was up there in the Northern product, if you like, but there was very much a not made here type of thing going on and lots and lots of politics floating around. It was a North South thing going on. There was a your product versus our product thing going on.
Tony:And it was failing. It was failing. And at a master stroke, the guy who I worked for at the time killed all of it by taking five key people out of the team in the North and said, I am now putting you in charge of making sure that this product is our future. If it fails, you fail. You will be remunerated, recognised, and promoted on the basis of the success or failure of this project.
Tony:No pressure. One of them decided to leave. Yeah. He was so emotionally bought into this Northern thing. The rest of them said, Okay, right, that requires a bit of a rethink now, emotionally, and in terms of politics, and everything else.
Tony:In the end, it worked. It worked really well. It took a long time. Got there. But it was there was a touch and go moment there when I thought, actually, this is not gonna work.
Georgie:If we're looking at it in the insurance industry, do you think as an industry, we do enough to bring people through change? Or are we still treating people like resources, really? Do you agree with that?
Tony:Yeah, I mean, don't think the insurance industry does it any better or any worse than any other industry. But I think generally, my experience, management doesn't address the human aspect of things well enough. And as I mentioned before, working bottom up as well as top down is a really key part of what management have to do. And the IT companies don't do it. So it's the responsibility of management and leadership to do that.
Tony:And they have to address four really important things. There's emotion. You announce it's gonna happen and everybody goes into a frenzy of, What does that mean? And you get all kinds of emotions, as we said, diverse and unpredictable. Then there's the trust thing.
Tony:Okay, this is gonna happen. Do I trust you to actually implement this and do this as a leadership team? You've outlined the strategy, but is it gonna work? Then they think about security. So what does it mean to me?
Tony:Am I gonna have a job? Where do I fit into the new strategy? What does that mean? Do I get promoted? Am I gonna get demoted?
Tony:I'm gonna push sideways. Is there a future for me? And then there's the final bit, identity. Who am I in all of this? And it's the responsibility of the leadership to consciously think about that.
Tony:It's hard, it's intangible. And because it's hard and intangible, so many companies and leaders don't do it. But I don't think actually insurance is any worse than any others in terms of doing that.
Georgie:If we're looking to solve the problem then, like change is inevitable, but what have you seen that actually really worked when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of driving transformation?
Tony:I'll tell you a great story about that. So I oh, this must be about seven or eight years ago, maybe a little bit more. Tier one insurer in the London market decided that they were going to Their IT estate was exhausted. It was old, it was not working, and they had to do something about it. They made the brave decision to replace the entire policy admin system and implement a new underwriting platform.
Tony:The underwriting had been previously done using spreadsheets and bubble gum and Blast pieces of some amazing. And they made the decision, signed the contracts. And the program director, who I have a lot of time for, he had a strategy of how he was gonna do this. And I don't think it was quite like this, but it was a bit like this. The old army thing where the guy lines up all of his lieutenants and he said, Right, this is what we're gonna do.
Tony:I want to volunteer. And all the smart people who already know what he's about to do, step back one and one person's left That's standing at the pretty well what happened. So one guy, one line of business, the guy was volunteered to do the job. So it was very much a, Oh, okay. Good luck with that, mate.
Tony:See you on the other side. But what they did was to work really hard at the engagement as they were implementing the underwriting platform for this line of business. Every two weeks, were show and tells. There was an open door policy to the department who were doing all the work. Come in anytime.
Tony:If you wanna see what's going on, people were saying, Right, so tell me what you want. Well, you really shouldn't have that up there. You should have it down here. We'd like to have an explosion of that data, a click, whatever it was, all that functionality. And every time they gave that feedback, that was starting to come into the software.
Tony:And say, well, I talk about it one day and then two weeks later, it's there on the screen. I can see it. So the people in that first line of business were starting to get more and more comfortable that this was really gonna work well for them. And they were starting to talk about how good this looked. And it specifically targeted key influential people within that line of business.
Tony:Doris down there. If Doris says it's okay, then everybody else is gonna go, Yeah, okay, actually, we're fine. And Mick will be sitting in his office several weeks down the line, and the knocks started to come on the door from the leaders of the other lines of business. I said, So Mick, so I know we didn't volunteer to be the first people here, but have you got a schedule for who's gonna be the second or the third? And he said, Well, if you want to be it, that's fine.
Tony:I can put you down, slot you in as the second or the third or whatever. You're gonna have to work at this, so you're gonna have to do commitment to do it all. Yeah, don't worry. We've seen what you're doing for these guys. I'll put my best people on this because we want to have the same kind of result that they've got.
Tony:And it just one by one knocked over all of the lines of business in this business. And it was a massive success. The COO who'd led all of this was asked to then go from that part of their London market business to another part of their London market business and do exactly the same thing again. So yes, it can be done. It needs some real good psychology.
Tony:You do need to work bottom up, as I've said, as well as top down. But if you do it right, it can be very successful.
Georgie:I know. That sounds like a great success story. Tech at the moment is evolving at a rapid pace. Yeah. How can companies make sure that the, like, the the people side of it keeps up with the rapid move of of change at the moment?
Tony:First thing to say is that tech companies are notorious for not wanting to address the human element of of what they do. Mhmm. Saying, right. So we got some software. We'll implement the software for you.
Tony:Yeah. It's up to you to make sure that your people use it. And that is almost always the mantra of technology companies.
Georgie:Can I say not artificial? We will deploy a solutions engineer to come sit in your office, who will make sure that what we're building is fit for purpose so we can get that real time feedback. Because for us, it's not just about giving you a software solution that sits on top of something. It needs to be embedded. It needs to be used for it to be successful.
Georgie:So we really try with that approach.
Tony:I think that's Lord of I'm gonna take my hat off to you. I think that's unusual in the technology world. I think in future, the highly successful companies will address that issue because clients want it.
Georgie:Oh, definitely.
Tony:But they don't know how to do it. Technology companies are delivering these things all the time. The clients are only doing these kind of projects once every five, ten, in some cases, twenty years, but they're not doing it regularly. And very often, the leaders and managers in those organizations are doing it for the first time. So they don't know how to do that.
Tony:So I think that's gonna be really important. But ultimately, management are responsible and leadership are responsible for looking after the welfare of their staff. So I'd say that they have to make sure that people feel safe, they have to feel involved and they have to be really clear about their future. Those are three things which are really, really important when people are deciding whether they want to support a new initiative. And if you can get people to feel that the right way about it, you're gonna have a lot more success.
Tony:It can be tough, particularly as I said before, if you've got a history of failed projects or difficult projects or long projects or projects that gave very little value or whatever, people will become cynical about things. And if you start from the position of everybody's gonna be cynical, how do we deal with that? I think you can then start to implement a strategies which deal with those issues, but you've gotta deal with them. There's no point sticking your fingers in your ears and going la la la la la. People are people and you can't get away from that.
Georgie:So I've got a two part question.
Tony:Okay.
Georgie:If you could give one part of advice to an insurance company and then one bit of advice to a tech company about implementing change, what would it be?
Tony:It's quite simple, really. Success is about achieving business outcomes. It's not about implementing an IT system. And both IT companies and insurance companies lose focus as they go through the project about the business outcomes. The number of times I've seen insurance companies saying, We have to build a business case.
Tony:We have to be absolutely clear. It has to be signed off by the board. These are the things, it's tangible outcomes, dah, dah, dah. And they get it all signed off. They start doing the implementation and nobody ever looks at managing or measuring the outcomes.
Tony:There's no, this week we manage this, this week manage that, we achieved this, we achieved this, we achieved this. And we now want to achieve exactly the number that we, or the outcome that we wanted to achieve. So losing focus on the business outcomes, I think, is the biggest failure that both tech companies implementing it for their clients and insurance companies who are on the receiving end of it, they do.
Georgie:Okay. So I'm gonna ask you a future forward looking question then, just to finish this off.
Tony:So what
Georgie:is the future of human relationships in an industry that is more automated every day?
Tony:I think the future is relationships are gonna be absolutely critical, as they have always been. At the end of the day, companies with good relationships will outperform those who have not got good relationships. Companies with good relationships and good IT will massively outperform those who don't have it. Ditch the spreadsheets and go out, pass that to the AI bot and go out and get a coffee with somebody. Just returning to what we were talking about right at the beginning of this, I look at what resources do you have as an organization?
Tony:What results are you trying to achieve? And how do you leverage the resources that you've got? And in insurance, particularly as an industry, relationship is one of those resources. And if you pull that lever, you are going to be successful. If you ignore it and say, Don't worry, IT will take care of that.
Tony:At best, you might be a follow on syndicate at Lloyd's, just copying what somebody else who has got the relationships is doing, the lead underwriter, you might be able to achieve something with that, but that's a very niche area. And I think the lead underwriters are always gonna make an awful lot more money than the follow ons. So yeah, I think it's always going to be critical.
Georgie:Thank you, Tony. That was a really engaging conversation. So thank you very much for joining me today.
Tony:I thoroughly enjoyed joining you. I did too.
Georgie:You are welcome back anytime. And thank you everybody for listening. As always, if there is anybody you would like to have on the podcast or anybody, any myths you would like me to debunk, then please drop me a message. Thank you.