Digital efficiency, human expertise: helping brokers trade with confidence

In a tough market, having the confidence to use all the tools at your fingertips can make a critical difference in growing efficiencies and maintaining margins. That’s why we’ve rebuilt our approach to digital trading to help brokers place larger and more complex risks online.

“We’ve shifted our emphasis from digital to trading. We’re making trading easier for brokers by expanding our capability across products, platforms and, most importantly, our people.” Rebecca Gambrell, Aviva’s Managing Director of SME & Delegated Authorities.

This approach reduces friction while improving the speed, quality and consistency of our responses. Nowhere is that clearer than in the way we’re evolving our products and support to help brokers trade more complex risks digitally.
 

Products designed to trade more complex risks

Over the past 12 months, we’ve worked hard to broaden cover across our Digital Commercial Combined and Property Owners products by stretching sums insured, turnover limits, product criteria, number of locations and underwriting appetite to accommodate larger, more complex risks.

“We’re also taking a new approach to Commercial Combined. By unpacking our core covers, we’re creating a flexible, modular approach. It enables brokers to build cover around the needs of their clients, starting with just material damage or liability.” Liz Walsh, Digital Trading Lead. 

Complex digital trading powered by people

Flexibility of cover is just one way we’re helping brokers complete more complex digital placements. One key element is making sure that they can access a dedicated team of Commercial Combined underwriters to support them. 

“Brokers tell us how important it is to be able to access underwriters easily at any stage of their quote journey. Just because it’s digital doesn’t mean you can’t talk to someone, whether it’s before, during or after placing cover.” Liz Walsh, Digital Trading Lead. 

Our dedicated digital underwriting teams also play a pivotal role when cover is referred or declined online. They’ll listen to brokers to understand the context and nuances of the risk, enabling us to make more informed decisions.

“We’ve created this specific team to respond to the increased appetite we’re seeing from brokers to place larger, more complex risks online. We know our people are the real enabler in this space, we can’t rely solely on trading platforms to make it happen. Brokers need increased confidence to help them transition from placing certain risks manually. That’s the role this team take.” Kat Halbert, Head of Digital Trading Operations.

This approach, underpinned by our robust training programme, ensures brokers have easy access to knowledgeable underwriters. They've the ability to deliver swift and consistent responses, demonstrating trading behaviours in a manner more akin to what brokers experience from their traditional, Mid-Market underwriting teams.
 

Digital tools that make trading smarter

Data and automation play a critical role across our platforms, creating a smoother journey for brokers from quote to bind. Data enrichment processes enable us to more fully understand clients’ risks and deliver accurate pricing, first time. On Fast Trade, data enrichment cuts both the number of questions and the time brokers need to spend answering them. It also enables automatic underinsurance detection, utilising data enrichment to highlight where a premises is at risk of underinsurance.

“Data helps us make trading as frictionless as possible. We constantly analyse our data, to support the Broker journey – for example looking at our referral data to understand how we can drive efficiency in straight-through processing.” Rebecca Gambrell, Aviva’s Managing Director of SME & Delegated Authorities.
 

Building confidence for the future

Digital trading is fast maturing into one of the main ways brokers trade. The challenge for many brokerages is to build confidence on the trading floor so that they can scale their existing investment to enable larger, more complex risks to be placed digitally.

“Even with a solid digitalisation strategy in place, many brokers still feel more comfortable placing certain risks manually. We want to help brokers bring their staff with them on this journey by building their confidence in the capability of our Digital proposition, including our people as well. That way everyone experiences the benefits of trading online, especially when it comes to larger, more complex risks.” Kat Halbert, Head of Digital Trading Operations.

From one-to-one support and in-depth webinars to training materials and consultancy, we’re here to support brokers and their staff.

“We want to make digital trading work for you. If you have any questions or aren’t sure about a risk, pick up the phone and talk to us.”  Liz Walsh, Digital Trading Lead.
 

Future efficiency backed by human expertise

Advances in data, automation and AI are creating new levels of flexibility and insight. They’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible through Fast Trade and Acturis eTrade, while helping us deliver a seamless experience whenever trades move between digital and manual handling.

We are utilising AI across the business and a great example of this is embedding AI into our platforms so that we can identify quotes within our target appetite that have yet to be converted. Our underwriters can then proactively reach out to the broker and offer them support to help win that business.

“While faster and more efficient, digital trading still needs that human touch to offer reassurance and understand grey areas. We want brokers to have complete confidence in what they can place digitally, knowing they have expert support whenever they need it.” Rebecca Gambrell, Aviva’s Managing Director of SME & Delegated Authorities.

That blend of capability and confidence will define how we deliver greater value in the future, as brokers place more business digitally and access connected services for their clients.

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