Optimising or Growing? Why Efficiency Does Not Always Move You Forward
This article is based on a column originally published in a Dutch professional insurance magazine that has been in circulation for over 89 years.
When efficiency becomes the default answer
I have sat in a lot of boardrooms over the past two and a half years, on the other side of the table from where I used to sit. And something keeps happening: when technology comes up, the conversation drifts towards efficiency within about ninety seconds. Faster processing. Lower cost per policy. Fewer manual steps. All sensible. All measurable. All beside the point.
I say that with some authority, because I spent nearly twenty years doing exactly the same thing. When I ran my own MGA, our proudest moments were usually about speed: how fast we could onboard, how clean the renewals ran, how few errors we had. And we were good at it. We were also, I now realise, spectacularly good at going nowhere in particular.
A KPMG report from early this year put a number on something I had been sensing for a while: around 84 percent of insurers now see AI primarily as a driver of commercial growth, not just efficiency. That figure surprised me, honestly. Not because it is high, but because it suggests the penny is finally dropping more broadly.
The difference between maintaining and growing
Here is what I have learned from working with brokers over the past two years, and it is something I wish someone had told me earlier: "optimisation" is often a very comfortable word for "not making hard decisions." You optimise what you have. You do not have to ask where growth is actually going to come from, or which parts of your portfolio are quietly bleeding value.
The hard questions are the ones that matter. Who is likely to leave next quarter? Which clients would say yes to broader coverage if someone actually asked them at the right moment? Which segments are you over-servicing relative to what they contribute? We have seen the answers to these questions across dozens of portfolios now, and they are almost always surprising. The clients firms worry about most are rarely the ones at greatest risk. The growth opportunities tend to be hiding in segments nobody is paying attention to.
A slightly different use of technology
The shift that matters is not from manual to digital -- that ship sailed years ago. It is from backward-looking to forward-looking. Technology that tells you what happened last quarter is useful. Technology that tells you what to do next Tuesday is a fundamentally different thing. And that distinction, which sounds obvious when you say it out loud, turns out to be genuinely difficult to act on.
From insight to action
I will confess something: I have developed a mild allergy to dashboards. Not because data visualisation is bad -- it is not -- but because our industry has confused looking at data with acting on it. I have seen firms with beautiful dashboards and completely static portfolios. At some point you have to call it what it is: expensive wallpaper.
What actually moves things is a prompt at the right moment. Not a chart, but a flag: this client's renewal is in six weeks, their risk profile has changed, here is what to discuss. We have watched advisers go from ignoring data entirely to acting on it daily -- but only when it arrived as a decision, not as a report. That was one of the things that surprised us most.
Where value tends to emerge
The moments that create real value are surprisingly specific. A conversation three weeks before a client was going to leave -- because the signal was there if you knew where to look. A relevant suggestion for broader coverage that lands because it is based on what actually changed in someone's situation, not a generic campaign sent to everyone. A clear view of which clients drive long-term profitability, so advisers spend their time where it counts.
None of this is revolutionary. But doing it consistently, across an entire portfolio, every week -- that turns out to be the hard part. And the part that actually makes the difference.
Final thought
Efficiency keeps things running. Growth comes from knowing where to steer. I spent the first twenty years of my career getting very good at the former. The last two and a half have been about learning the latter. I am still learning, to be honest. But at least I know which question I should be asking.