Covéa Insurance eyes broader e-trade offering

Covéa Insurance is planning to improve its performance in next year’s Insurance Times broker e-trading survey by launching a new comprehensive ‘all-risks’ commercial combined product.

The insurer scored a four-star rating overall, placing joint sixth out of 11 providers.

However, when broken down by service factor, Covéa was weaker in breadth of cover and product range – ranking ninth out of 11 with a three-star rating.

This category was judged by brokers as the second most important service factor, only narrowly behind price competitiveness.

Broker needs

Eugene O’Callaghan, Covéa’s Acturis e-trade development manager said he was pleased with the overall rating and that it reflected the work done listening to brokers, and adapting their proposition accordingly.

He said Covéa would continue to make improvements by listening to brokers.

“We know our product range needed some work,” he said. “Brokers have been telling us for some time that we need a product that can cater for traditional combined risks, but also cater for business that doesn’t quite fit another Covéa SME product – this is where e-trade commercial combined comes in.”

The product includes cyber liability and is modular, meaning customers don’t pay for covers they don’t need. O’Callaghan said this aspect was “ground-breaking”.

He added: “Early feedback has been very positive and our new product manager is working on widening the footprint further to cater for more business and an even more diverse selection of trades.”

Improvements

The product can be traded either via Acturis or through the Covéa Insurance Online extranet site.

Covéa has said it is the first in a series of e-traded products to be launched this year, with motor fleet to follow.

O’Callaghan said he was “very excited” about some of the changes due to come to Covéa Insurance Online in the next year. He highlighted other service factors in its e-trade offering, such as in quality of questions asked where Covéa ranked eighth out of 14 insurers, where further improvements could still be made.

“We’ve focused on the development of our new e-trade commercial combined product and we know we haven’t given our extranet the focus it deserves,” he said. “Future plans for this site will see revisions to the question set and more functionality, following feedback from the engagement work we regularly undertake with our brokers.”

On the whole, though, O’Callaghan said he was delighted with Covéa’s performance in the survey, and in particular the number of brokers that responded.

He said: “The numbers of brokers that responded is significantly higher than previous years, reflecting the fact we are partnering with more and more brokers and our reputation continues to drive our growth.”