Insurance industry has a ‘dearth of creativity’ – Sam White

There is an overabundance of “numbers people” in the insurance industry that has meant there is a “dearth of creativity” in the sector. 

That was according to Stella Insurance founder and chief executive Sam White, who spoke yesterday (27 February 2024) at the ABI Conference during a panel session entitled Securing the future of the general insurance market. 

White explained: ”We have an over-index of numbers people, which is inevitable because we deal with finance and finance tends to attract people that are attracted to numbers.

”We don’t have enough creatives – we have a dearth of creativity in insurance and we don’t attract creative personalities.” 

She added that while the insurance sector’s problem solving focused on solutions utilising data and technology, challenges such as how to deal with rising motor policy costs required creativity to “think differently about the problems and find different solutions, [rather than] better solutions with the same model”.

Being realisitic 

Creativity in the insurance sector is so desperately needed because of the rise of modern challenges. 

White provided the example of areas in Australia that had become uninsurable due to the impacts of global warming and severe weather.

However, rather than the insurance industry completely abandon these problematic issues, White said: ”Instead of trying to solve the whole problem, we could solve some of it.

”We could use a parametric insurance policy to provide some cover, because helping people somewhat is better than just walking away entirely”