L&G's Peter Graham: Let’s start to work together

Insurance Times recently featured a roundtable debate on the subject of consumer trust in the insurance industry – an issue that has been bubbling under the surface for a long time, without much concerted cross-industry effort to address it (save the Chartered Insurance Institute’s excellent investigation into consumer trust and the insurance industry).

Legal & General sponsored the debate, and did so from an earnest desire to get major opinion-formers from across the industry together in a spirit of co-operation to improve public image.

I don’t want to labour the points that have been amply covered by the write-up of the discussion, but I’d like to present my view of how we can move this debate forward to the next level.

First, the Financial Ombudsman Service has been publishing complaints data, which is a great way to keep the industry on its toes, but shouldn’t the industry be coming together and publishing satisfaction data in response? Currently, we are all too cagey with each other about this.

It’s from fear of losing a perceived edge over the opposition, but most of us are proud to pay genuine claims and I think we need to find a way of communicating this to the media and the public at large. I believe that we can also overcome any competition issues if we restrict the sharing of information to service, with the overall goal of increasing the industry’s level of service.

Secondly, we can’t ignore that there are areas where customers justifiably feel let down. Trust has been shaken in financial services in general recently, but there has been a certain degree of long-standing antagonism created by failures that long pre-date the global financial crisis.

In order to begin dispelling some of the myths around insurance and help to rebuild trust, we need to make sure that our service to customers making claims is efficient, reassuring and goes the extra mile. For example, this is working well in the insurance protection market where stats issued on the level of critical illness claims that are paid has improved the public’s perception of the value of this cover.

If the industry comes together in a renewed covenant to rebuild trust amongst consumers, we can genuinely hope to see some success. At Legal & General, we have significantly enhanced the service provided to our household insurance claims customers; in particular, we have sped up the validation of claims and can now reach a resolution much faster.

If we continue to view collaboration as detrimental to the success of each individual business, it is doubtful that we will be able to win over consumers’ hearts and minds and we should expect insurance to remain a grudge purchase. If the appetite is there, however, this is something we can all play a part in changing.

Peter Graham is managing director of Legal & General's general insurance business.