eTrading forms a ‘totally critical’ part of RSA’s market ambitions

Following its statement acquisition of Direct Line Group’s (DLG) commercial lines operations – primarily comprising the NIG and FarmWeb brands – last year (6 September 2023), RSA has made much of its ambition to become the best commercial lines insurer in the market. 

After the deal, RSA chief executive Ken Norgrove told this publication that it would now aim to “outperform” its peers in the market.

One area that is absolutely essential to this drive for outperformance is eTrading.

Speaking to Insurance Times following the release of the latest Five Star Rating Report: eTrading 2024 at the Biba Conference, Rob Fairs, RSA product and channel director for SME commercial lines, said: ”We’ve got a stated ambition in the market to be the best commercial lines insurer by the end of 2025 – and the RSA Online eTrading component is a totally critical part of that.” 

In Insurance Times’ latest eTrading report, RSA Online achieved a four star rating and rose from a three star rating in the previous year, continuing a positive trajectory that begun three years ago. 

The insurer also moved up from tenth place to fourth for 2024, with brokers awarding the firm four stars across each of the five service categories investigated – breadth of cover and product range, quality and number of questions asked, quality of support, quotability and usability and trading ease. 

In each of these categories, except for quality and number of questions asked, RSA Online actually increased by two stars to reach four stars – rising from a 2023 rating of two stars. 

Fairs added: “When it comes to eTrade, it only works when the whole proposition works in terms of the products, the pricing, the relationship and, critically, the ease of service. 

“Three and half years ago, we started on the journey of very heavy investments in RSA Online and we’ve delivered over 400 changes over the past two years to improve our online journey.” 

The eTrading survey that provided the data for the Five Star Rating Report: eTrading 2024 was open to UK brokers between January and March 2024 and surveyed a total of 700 brokers from across the country on their eTrading experience over the previous 12 month period. 

Vital feedback

Considering the strides that RSA has made year-on-year in the eTrading report, what has informed its improvement? 

Fairs explained: ”When we started looking at [the eTrading] journey, we started from a place of not thinking that we already knew what we needed to improve. 

“We engaged with a group of brokers for testing and feedback to identify where we had weak links in the platform and what brokers wanted to see improve in our offering. Actually using that feedback has been the cornerstone of our approach to improving our online proposition.” 

The approach of not fixing something that ain’t broke has clearly served the insurer well from the perspective of its broker partners – and Fairs said this approach would continue to inform RSA’s momentum going forward. 

He explained: ”This year, the pace of change and recognition within the market has really kicked on, but we are restless not to be in the pack – we want to be leading the pack.

”This is really the start of our journey. We’ve now got a solid foundation to really kick on from and improve and to be the best commercial insurer, we need to have five stars. That’s our ambition.” 

Tovah Grosscurth, who became RSA’s commercial lines director with responsibility for SME and eTrade business in February this year, was brought into the role to continue an improvement in the insurer’s eTrade performance. 

She added: “We’ve made a big improvement, but part of my role is saying that we don’t stop there. We can’t start backing off. We want that five stars and we want to move forward.” 

Proactive service 

As part of its information gathering, which is then used to inform further developments of its service, Grosscurth said that RSA makes “hundreds” of outbound contacts to brokers whenever their eTrading experience is rated as anything less than good – either average or below average. 

She noted: ”We ask those brokers what we could have done differently and what there is that we could fix for them. That gives us a real depth to our insight.

“We’ve also done a lot of work on our referrals, because we know that the speed at which we turn referrals around is absolutely key to our brokers. There are different strands here, but one of them is the empowerment of our people and we’ve worked a lot on how we license people and how that cascade works to ensure that we get them to the right license holder and get a quick response back.”

Fairs added that, while RSA was seeking to continually improve its eTrading offering, this was a holistic exercise in ensuring that the firm was set up to provide brokers with what they want.

”We need to make sure we want to win the business [that flows through our eTrade platform], we need to make sure we have a chance of winning it and that we’re resourced to win it,” he said. 

”Even if it’s a no, we need to make sure we’re telling brokers that straight away and that’s part of a strategy that we’ve been working really hard on over the last couple of years.” 

Integrated service

RSA’s acquisition of the NIG brand could also present a risk of throwing a spanner in the works where eTrading was concerned, especially if two businesses were forced together without thought. 

With this in mind, Grosscurth said that integrating the two businesses and their respective eTrade propositions was “make or break” and “absolutely critical to get right”. 

She explained that, at this stage, the two businesses were exercising a balanced approach that blended speed and care while continuing to operate separately under one roof. Staff from each firm have been shadowing thier counterparts and working hard to do the detailed analytical work of blending the two firms’ together.

“From an SME perspective, they’re both very solid businesses,” Grosscurth explained. 

”They’ve got great foundations and are proven to work, so there’s not an obvious choice of which recipe to adopt because neither is weaker. It’s more about very detailed analysis from the product perspective to ensure that we make the right decisions when we eventually move to one product set.” 

However, Fairs added, the integration of NIG into RSA presents opportunities around both distribution and data for the firm’s eTrading offering to brokers. 

He finished: “The move has unlocked a lot of insight for us and placed us in a really fantastic position – now we need to ensure that we combine the best of both [businesses] to really delight our brokers.”