Interview with Andreas Krause, AIG Head of Sales, Northern Europe, and Deputy General Manager for Germany

Mr. Krause, AIG in Germany has undergone a complete reorganization over the past twelve months. What will be the strategic direction of the company for the future?

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Commercial insurance for SME: AIG goes digital

As the third largest insurance market in the world, Germany has top priority for AIG. In the past, we took a quite broad approach and covered many areas. Today, we are more focused and focus our business on three core areas.

In the first area, the Client Segment, we have groups of companies, who - due to their international profile - are a natural partner for AIG.

The second focus is on technical brokers, who advise the industrial customer sector in Germany. We are striving to achieve a partnership with these businesses, in which we work together to find solutions that are beneficial for all parties.

Our third pillar is the digitization of the insurance business for SME. In this area, we want to become Germany's leading insurer. As a pioneer in the industry, we are consistently focusing on a viable digital business model and will start digitizing the entire value chain over the next weeks and months.

Are you happy with the development so far?

In the industrial customer segment, we see significant growth, which shows us that we have taken the right path. In the SME customer segment, we are busy reaching milestones with AIG’s digitization. In 2017, we will almost completely convert our analogue product range to the digital BiPRO standard to give brokers the opportunity to quickly and efficiently create quotations and concluded new deals online in the future. The process is as simple as booking a flight. Time and administrative expenses for brokers are thus significantly reduced.

You have set yourself the goal to fully digitize your SME customer business. But the business is often highly individualized. How much automation will be possible at all?

Our wordings are at a very high level and enable our customers to cover a large number of their risks. In order to meet individual needs, we can, of course, set up tailor-made concepts for these products and continue to provide our sales partners with target group-specific concepts. The new world of BiPRO products is not inflexible. Instead, it allows us to make adjustments with very little effort, thereby providing our sales partners with own tariffs and wordings. However, this will not be possible for an individual contract, but will require a certain business volume.

Which role does the implementation of the BiPRO standards play in this context?

The introduction of the BiPRO standards in the German market plays a decisive role in the digitization of the process landscape between brokers and insurers. Because of these common standards, we are able to create solutions that will be accessible to multiple market participants. As the market development in this direction is not fast enough from our perspective, we have created so-called "microsites", which enable us to work with insurance partners, who have not yet been able to develop these interfaces.

How can insurance brokers benefit from the development?

Currently the term BiPRO is often interpreted in the market as meaning "electronic documents". But the BiPRO standards offer much more. It is precisely these standards for the conclusion of new business that provide a lot of benefits for brokers working with us: they tremendously increase the speed of setting up quotations and closing contracts. Our microsites bundle these advantages and even enable brokers, who currently do not have direct access to the insurer's web services, to benefit from these speed and service advantages.

What do you mean by "microsites"?

We call our digital applications "microsites" and “partner shops ". A microsite is a calculation and conclusion tool based on a specific product (including partner conditions, download centre, info market). A partner shop is a web portal in which several microsites are bundled to a customized product range for selected cooperation partners. If a special concept has been agreed with one of our partners (special wording and/or pricing), this partner will have his own, customised partner shop. All our partners, who do not yet have BiPRO capabilities, can benefit from the bridging technology provided by us.

Interview published in “AssCompact”/04/2017