As New Zealand heads into another snap lockdown, businesses are putting their well-tried and tested continuity plans into action, and the insurance sector has taken significant learnings from the previous periods of disruption.
Commenting on the impact of COVID-19 throughout the past 18 months, Quashed co-founder and CEO Justin Lim said that while the pandemic had caused a significant amount of disruption, it had also pushed innovation and more investment into the digital space.
“We weren’t fundraising or raising capital at the time of the first lockdown, but I think COVID was great for us in one sense because we’ve seen so much investment go into technology companies, just because of the way that everything was going digital,” Lim said.
“I think insurance companies have also benefited from that, and there have definitely been many things that they’ve had to change, whether it’s the way they work, or their systems.”
“For us, we also had to try and be innovative,” he explained.
“As an example, one thing we managed to do was hire a designer who was working out of the UK as a freelancer. That actually turned out to be the best thing, because what would happen was that I’d take a call at 8pm when it was around 7am in the UK, and I would go through what needed to be done. Then I would go to bed, and, when I woke up, all of the work would be there.”
Lim said that lockdowns had provided the perfect opportunity for insurers and insurance businesses to experiment, and to see what worked best within the “new normal.”
“I think there have been so many good things that have come out of it in so many respects, and because of the situation that we’ve found ourselves in, it’s given us much room to go and think about things quite differently,” Lim said.
“We’ve all tried something new, and there have been things we’ve tried that haven’t turned out quite the way we thought they would. But I think that’s the beauty of being able to explore and experiment, and it’s certainly benefited us.”
