The insurance business is an outward facing business built around selling products to individual and business consumers. Therefore, insurance service providers, like all sophisticated consumer-driven businesses, must carefully and constantly assess their markets and strategies to remain relevant in a highly competitive environment. From consumer data analytics, to proper risk pricing, to efficient distribution channels, to navigating social media, to managing the highly regulated nature of insurance sales and distribution, insurance providers operate in a highly competitive environment that rewards discipline as well as innovation. Successful companies identify and make tough decisions to correct underperforming parts of their portfolios and they temper their approaches to new products where loss costs and pricing requirements are uncertain. They innovate by thinking first about new and evolving loss exposures their customers face and develop insurance products and services that respond. They focus on the client experience through the entire insurance process and create specialized/differentiated products and services to either avoid commoditization or leverage it, depending on the needs of that market and the strengths of that insurer.
The focus of this core course, in MSIM’s Insurance Rotation area of study, will include the history and the evolution of the insurance industry across the three main insurance sectors, i.e. property/casualty, life and health. The course will address factors that drive company investment in and/or withdrawal from specific products and markets and the complexities around developing, pricing and selling a product for which costs are determined only after claims have been paid – something that often occurs many years after the policy was sold. The course will consider how providers are expanding beyond traditional products into related services and how technology is increasing innovation around product design and marketing.