The ‘mobility as a service’ revolution is well underway, and Marsh McLennan’s (MMC) Sam Tiltman (pictured) has a message to deliver to the insurance and risk management market – the time is right to step up and be one of the drivers in evolving ‘the future of mobility’ into mobility.
In an interview with Insurance Business, Tiltman, who heads up Marsh’s sharing economy and mobility practice in the UK, noted that the future of mobility is here and it’s revolutionising how people and things move from place to place. As a long-term supporter of this ecosystem, he said, MMC has developed a unique vantage point of the market which is made up of a diverse array of players – from startups and scale-ups to large corporates who recognise the scale of the opportunity at hand.
“My opening gambit for the industry is that we have the opportunity to step up and be the enabler and that if we don’t step up, our clients aren’t going to wait for us to catch up,” he said. “There are two sides to this. The positive side is the amazing opportunity we have to not only be an enabler of business but also to actually support these new technological innovations.
“The other side of the coin is that if we don’t do it, our clients and the mobility industry are not going to wait. They will do it for themselves and, in doing so, they will disrupt our industry. My call to action for our insurance partners is that now is the time to invest. These new mobility innovations are coming ready or not, and if you don’t invest now you will lose out because at best, you’ll struggle to catch up and, at worst, you could be completely disrupted and replaced.”
As someone who didn’t start his career in insurance, Tiltman has a more objective view than most in the market regarding where insurance and risk management can – and does – fit in with the mobility revolution. The issue facing the market, he said, is that traditionally insurance comes very far down the line for decision makers.
Risk management in a company should, at a strategic level, be owned by the board and senior decision makers, with risk and governance frameworks built around that – and insurance is just one instrument in a toolkit of risk management. But traditionally, it follows that insurance is only front-of-mind once something has occurred and is treated as either a lower category purchase or a reactionary purchase.
“Insurance often comes up quite late in the process of a client enacting a change,” he said. “In an extreme situation, it can even be a grudge purchase for consumers which is viewed as a sunk cost – even by some corporations. That’s because it’s a cost that most people don’t really see the principal benefit of insurance until something bad happens.”
‘New mobility’, or just mobility as MMC calls it, is an opportunity for insurance to buck that trend, he said, and to prove that insurance is a critical component of business enablement. When MMC drives conversations about empowering or accelerating possibility around new modes of mobility, it is doing so in the firm belief that insurance and risk management is as crucial to its success as the technology or the people powering the technology.
“It’s one of those critical elements of the circular supply chain, not an afterthought,” he said. “Because with a lot of these new mobility models, if there’s no insurance, there’s no mobility. Without insurance, the client can’t operate, can’t get investment, can’t undertake research & development and can’t commercialise. That elevates insurance beyond just a treasury or risk management tool which is really fascinating, but also exciting to see.”
‘Evolve or die’ is a timely warning for the insurance market as it faces into the challenges and the opportunities presented by fast-developing new mobility solutions. When you look at the structure of the commercial insurance sector, he said, you realise it hasn’t really changed since the late 1600s. It has restructured into geographies, lines of businesses or products which evolved at a time when the world was a lot simpler, and risk was less interconnected.
“These new mobility clients and technology clients more generally don’t have that limitation,” he said. “They’re solving complex problems and creating simple solutions for users and they’re not confining themselves through legacy thinking.”
The problem insurance is facing is that new mobility doesn’t sit neatly within the confines of the product class that the industry is principally structured into. Motor vehicle, as a class, has been around for about 100 years, he said, while motor insurance has been a legal requirement in the UK since the 30s. These old concepts have a great track record but they struggle to adapt to anything new that doesn’t fit within its clearly delineated ‘buckets’.
“What we’re advocating insurers to do, and what we’re doing as brokers at Marsh, is rather than take a product approach to unleashing these opportunities, take a solutions-based approach,” he said. “That means being more consultative – what does the client want to achieve, what’s their ambition, what’s their business model? Once we understand the deployment and how it’s going to work, then we look at the risk landscape, map out risk management procedures – and then we solve the insurance challenge.”
“We don’t constrain ourselves with just talking to a single department, we go out to the carrier and say, ‘how do we solve this movement risk in a way that’s smooth and invisible?’ Taking a solution-based approach versus that old-fashioned product-based approach is at the crux of what we’re trying to achieve here.”
It’s a difficult mindset shift for even the most willing to change and evolve but Tiltman is throwing down the gauntlet to the insurance market by inviting it to evolve its structure while tapping back into the very roots of where insurance came from – and the innovation and entrepreneurship that remains at the heart of the insurance proposition.
“I’m convinced we have most of the ingredients,” he said. “If you look at what Lloyd’s was originally doing – it was about enabling investment into what became international commerce. If you look at the history of shipping, the technological advancement seen was incredible. From evolving construction methods to the Industrial Revolution, the industry supported and enabled those developments which tied international commerce together.
“We’ve done this before for shipping, then we did this again for aviation. Now we’ve got new mobility and it’s our time to step up again and be a part of this. The challenge facing us is that these innovations don’t fit neatly into product silos.
“But we have the right people, and we have the experience of doing this before in other areas. It’s just about mindset and investment. We need to embrace that sandbox approach taken by so many technology companies, and start thinking more about possibility, and not be so afraid of failing.”
