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Issue - Quality in insurance
"Poor public perception, low profits, high procurement
costs, new distribution channels, poor return on investments,
growing management expenses are all posing greater challenges
to the insurance industry."
The
Business Need
It is a common perception that by and large Insurance Companies
still do not meet the "quality expectations" of
its customers. Of course this does not apply to all Insurance
Companies. Commonly held belief is that the Banking Sector
and other financial sector companies have much better reputation
as professionals than insurers.
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The
reason is not difficult to find. There has been no conscious
effort on the part of insurance companies to institute quality
in their operations. Let us see,
- How
many insurance companies are winners of Excellence Award
the world over?
- How
many Insurance Companies even think it appropriate to apply
for these Excellence Awards
- How
many Insurance Companies have adopted Business Excellence
Model as a philosophy to excel.
- How
many insurance companies use self - assessment tool to identify
areas for improvement, regularly?
The
answer is - very few.
This
site would attempt to explain how the simple application of
quality can make a big difference in the image of an insurance
company and how the insurance companies internationally can
benefit from this approach.
"Poor
management practices and operational weaknesses have played
a big role in the failure of some 270 UK and European insurers
in the past five years. Will another 300 do so before the
end of the decade? If this is to be averted, the biggest wins
are likely to be not from the next generation of highly engineered
statistical models but from focusing on the closer-to-home
topics of management and operational weaknesses, for these
are the real villains behind recent failures".. This
is one of the main conclusions of a study led last year by
the UK's Financial Services Authority (FSA) into insurance
companies across Europe that failed or nearly failed between
1996 and 2001. The study's aim was to find out about the risks
that brought these companies to a crisis and especially how,
in practice, these risks interacted under stress.
When looking at individual cases, the study found that, although
on the surface insurance failures are attributable to technical
factors such as Underwriting, Reserving or Asset management,
these are always the result of other , previous causes, such
as management or operational weaknesses.
The
site would address issues of Leadership, Policy and Strategy,
People Management, Partnership and Resources and Process Improvement
in the context of an insurance set-up to show how systematic
attention/application would enable an insurance organization
to improve it's results in the following areas:
- Customers
- People
- Society
and
- Business
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