The mission at the heart of Stubben Edge group – to revolutionise insurance distribution for good – offers a snapshot of what first brought the business together and now underpins its rapid evolution. For deputy CEO Karen Baretto (pictured), her early conversations with group CEO Chris Kenning quickly revealed their shared passion for taking an unorthodox approach to operating in a largely traditional sector.
It was when they were together as the UK distribution arm for an Isle of Man insurance company that they first recognised the challenges facing the insurance marketplace. These weren’t just the technical challenges of poor data visibility, manual processing, regulatory pressures and the weight of legacy systems, she said, but also a problem of mindset as, all too often, the sector found itself siloed into one style of insurance or another.
“We found that players in the industry tended to either stick to general insurance, or life insurance, or wealth management, and you didn’t really get a merging of financial services,” she said. “We were lucky to be working at a company with a composite insurance license allowing them to do it and recognised how that helped us to really see the client, to find out about their needs, their concerns and their objectives – and to build a solution orientated to that.”
It soon became clear that the traditionally siloed approach to doing business wasn’t to the benefit of the end customer or the insurance distributor themselves. With that in mind, Baretto and Kenning looked to build a system aimed at reducing this inefficiency by catering for multiple different products and services, targeted at the specific needs of the client, by sharing the appropriate data across these different products.
When the time came that the owners of the business they were working for wanted to exit, they were passionate and positive enough about the inroads they had made to undertake a management buyout in 2018 – which saw the group rebrand as Stubben Edge. Back then, she said, they were a team of five, but having recently celebrated its sixth anniversary, the team is now made up of 50 people and has completed a dozen acquisitions over the last 12 months.
“For us, the focus has been on how we can add different products and services to our tech platform to then present these to our [partners], to allow them to transact in a way that allows them to really understand their clients,” she said. “With this platform, they have the ability to leverage our connected data, technology and insurer relationships, allowing them to focus on what they’re good at - which is distribution and client-facing relationships.”
As Stubben Edge started to expand its reach across the sector, Baretto noted it became clearer than ever where gaps in brokers being able to offer full-service expertise to their clients were beginning to show.
“When I started out, I was tasked with pulling together all of the group insurances that we needed, from pensions, to life, to general insurance policies,” she said. “And I remember thinking to myself that I was going to need to speak to at least six different intermediaries. I work in insurance and financial services but I still found myself duplicating information because these intermediaries weren’t talking to each other.
“I was saying the same thing over and over because nobody was looking at how those data points interlink and relate to each other to give me a more cohesive, holistic package. In turn, that made me feel that the whole experience was just transactional as opposed to being the more consultative approach you’d hope for from such an important buying decision.”
As somebody with a strong background in legal and financial services environments, it became clear that if she was struggling with the approach taken to offering coverage, then people outside of the market were being significantly more disadvantaged. Navigating financial services can be a minefield, she said, but it doesn’t have to be – and the mission of Stubben Edge is to make buying insurance more efficient and accessible.
“There are people out there who haven’t been insured in the right way, or they don’t understand the risk-reward balance of insurance,” she said. “For others, it’s a fight to the bottom in terms of going on to aggregatory sites where the offering is more based on price rather than features or the extent of the coverage you or your business actually need. As long as this remains, it’s hard for consumers to understand how insurance is going to add value for them as a person or a business.”
With clients expecting a ‘retail’ proposition from the insurance offering, distributors need to make insurance as accessible, efficient and reliable as possible. Stubben Edge is passionate about the importance of a healthy insurance distribution ecosystem, Baretto said, and by supporting its clients by taking on the back-office burden of their operations, the business is looking to protect the longevity of brokers and MGAs.
“It’s in distribution and the power of expert advice that you find the fun, the excitement and the passion of this industry,” she said. “I still absolutely believe this is a people industry and if you ever take that away, you’ll lose its heart. I like dealing with people, I like understanding what their hopes and their objectives are, and finding ways that we can help them achieve them.
“We’re passionate about changing insurance distribution because we believe that if you take it away, you will make insurance transactional and automated. And while I do think there’s a place for automation in the industry, it’s not in terms of our relationships.”
