Back to leading the e-pack: Q&A with Alasdair Stewart

What’s your view of AXA’s e-commerce capability?

It’s disappointing. When Independent Insurance went bust in 2001, AXA bought its e-commerce unit, www.businessrisk.com. When I left the last time, in 2001, AXA Business Risk was a clear leader in the market, beginning to explore connectivity. Fast forward to 2011 and the market is still talking about the same things. There is still not enough product, and still not enough brokers committed to e-commerce. What are we talking about – it’s 2011!

What are your aims for e-commerce?

We have aggressive targets for growing accounts and improving COR, which means taking out cost. Taking out cost from the transaction is better for everyone: lower operating cost for us and the broker, lower price point for the customer. But if we just say to brokers: ‘it’s about reducing our costs’, that’s not going to work. We have to demonstrate that it benefits everyone in the chain. A lot of carriers are doing a lot of business on the internet, but we still need to sell the concept. Maybe we’ve been poor at communicating.

We were a clear leader, but we are now much of a muchness with the others. The challenge is how to reverse that.

How do you aim to become market leader?

We’ve slipped back in the pack, but the leader is not that far out in front. There will be a lot of change: a product overhaul – we will have six revamped SME automated products by end of the year. And AXA products need to be ubiquitous.

In 1996, all we did was to put our brochures online. Some insurers took their traditional products and put them on the internet. For the broker, it was just the same but on a computer. The question is: how do we provide information, and make it a better and slicker experience for the broker? We need to make it easy for the broker to do business.

There is enormous scope for content around the transaction; it’s not always about getting the deal done. Sometimes it’s about information. We should be able to provide valuable content to the broker, and the customer. There are ideas about knowledge transfer and guidance that we and the broker should be exploring. And we have to provide good, sensible reasons for why a broker should work with us electronically.

What else?

Small stuff – we have to make it easy for a broker to interact with the customer and get what he needs, without touching the sides. In the past, you’d submit a proposal that was allocated to an underwriter, and then have a chat. It was not using e-commerce to seal the deal. But it’s a people business, so we should still be able to talk, but using all the tools of e-commerce: Skype, video conferencing, database searching; so that we’re actually able to provide expertise and make the transaction.

Is it all SME lines?

Our heartland is SME; we don’t do a lot of big corporate stuff. It’s SME risk, small package products. But it’s not just our traditional products with all the questions. To be differentiated, products and websites need to be specially designed to make a good experience for the brokers. We need to help the broker be positive that the risk is secure as customer complexity rises.

AXA owns Swiftcover in personal lines. We can learn from the way they talk to their customers - it’s a different experience, a different tone. We need a better proposition, and proper communication – providing compelling reasons for the broker to use e-trading.

Will commercial follow personal lines online?

Folk have got used to buying motor policies and home online. Most spectators expect commercial to follow that pattern. If you’re doing your private car insurance online, is it a big step to do your van or small business insurance? We all believe it will happen.

Brokers use aggregators to find the best price. The fear with aggregators is that they go for cheapest quote, but don’t always understand what it means for the customer. But a broker using an aggregator is quite powerful for his business, and his customer.

How much of AXA’s commercial lines business is done by e-commerce?

It’s about £75m - split roughly half van and half commercial property liability. We work with 300 brokers, as well as iPrism, broker2broker, and PowerPlace. We also supply quotes to simplybusiness.co.uk, for Moneysupermarket and Gocompare.