Watch: Personal Lines and Aviva Private Clients developments

Question – What’s Aviva’s commitment to the broker Personal Lines market?

Matthew Baker - Commitment to the Personal Lines market, 100% from Aviva; get asked loads of questions around because of the success of our retail channels. Is Aviva committed to the broker market? Absolutely! We are committed to the broker market. You can see that through all the innovation that we're doing, within our teams, you can see that we've got the most investment we have had in the recent years to invest in finishing off items like our insurer-hosted pricing, to invest in items like Flood Re through our software house capability through our data analytics and investment in people to be able to support the broker channel and how we've actually completely remodelled our business actually to centre around our broker Personal Lines business. So, we've actually pulled together a whole end-to-end distribution channel under Owen Morris, who’s the Managing Director of our Personal Lines business. We won't as Aviva achieve our goals as being our number one Personal Lines insurer in the market if we don't have brokers, so we need to invest in the broker channel, we are invested in the broker channel and we are committed to the broker Channel. Tom.

Thomas French - Well, yeah. In addition to that in the Private Clients space, it's been a challenging time for brokers. Aviva are really, really committed to supporting the brokers in the Private Clients world, and we're a big part of the Personal Lines journey here at Aviva. We've had a lot of investment in our IT and our product strategy, and we're making sure that we're able to offer lots of different products to a whole suite of wealth in the market, from emerging mid-net worth wealth right through to the high and ultra-high net worth clients as well.

Matthew Baker - I think where we see brokers being really, really invaluable to us is, obviously we've got our retail channels, the brokers have that access to customers we won't access through our retail channels. Brokers have that customer insight that we can bring into our pricing. It allows us, you know, to be able to write a whole broad church of customers, to brokers, a real important from high street brokers to the aggregator panels to our non-standard brokers and scheme brokers that can actually be able to deliver the overall Aviva Personal Lines growth story so we can't deliver our overall Personal Lines growth story if we don't have a broker channel.

Question – What resources does Aviva have to provide a comprehensive insurance solution?

Matthew Baker - So if you look at, I mentioned around the investment that we've had in recent years. So looking at how we've restructured the Aviva Personal Lines business, so we've got Owen Morris, who's the MD of our overall Personal Lines business and the channel that we've created now is actually, a ring-fenced broker channel. So we've got an MD of Broker, in John Santa and then you've got the distribution team, through myself and my team, we've got the broker operations team. They've recently moved in to our line as well. So we're investing in that service model. So if you think about how brokers want to actually engage with us, at the moment, we do an awful lot of engagement through facilities like live chat. Actually, what we want to do is we want to innovate and open up that service model. So we want to do more in the referral model. We want to be able to write more business, which is kind of in the sort of the grey and doesn't necessarily fit straight through a software house. So we're investing in our fast trade tool, which is very, very successful in the commercial environment. But also we've got Personal Lines products on Fast Trade, and we want to build that out as well, to be able to write more risks through that. As I said, we're talking about the investment across Flood Re, across insurer-hosted pricing. By beginning of next year, Aviva will have insurer-hosted pricing across every single software house on every single product, which allows us to deliver the most sophisticated rates to market. We've also invested in our people. We're recruiting within our service teams and our operations teams, service broker personal lines. So we've invested in new roles within the team, So we've got a motor trading role. We've got a household trading role. So that's actually focusing on speaking to individual brokers understanding, you know, the geographical differences between regional brokers and looking at how we can actually ingest data from those different models. So through those roles and Data Analytics, we're able to actually price, you know, a lot more accurately to be able to write more business for our regional footprint.

Question - What do you offer brokers which helps differentiate you from the competition?

Thomas French - The investment we've had in the Private Clients space here at Aviva is really important that we're different from the competition and that we do something that's not available readily to our brokers via other markets. I think there are a few things we do that really stand us out from our competitors. The first thing is that we're one of the only insurers really, that are able to look at emerging wealth clients and mid net worth clients right through to the high and ultra-high net worth clients. We've got products for each segment in that space, and we're really invested in the way we trade with brokers in that space, which will be unique. But aside from that, I think we've really got a leading team of experts and our underwriters, our claims managers, our risk managers. We've got an excellent team, lots of knowledge, lots of capability, and I think that's really what sets us apart and makes us special in the Private Clients space.

Question – What’s your take on BIBA 2024?

Matthew Baker - Excellent to be here at BIBA again. The Aviva stand has been exceptionally busy all day.  Lots and lots of interest in relation to, as I mentioned earlier on around capacity restrictions within the Personal Lines market. Lots and lots of opportunity from brokers coming to talk to us, around opportunities that they want to place with Aviva, innovative ideas, talking to brokers that are trying to differentiate themselves in the Personal Lines market, ideas in relation to using data, ideas in relation to how they're actually accessing different types of customers. So BIBA's been absolutely brilliant. Really, really great ideas coming from brokers today. This afternoon, I'm sure it's going to be exactly the same. And I'm sure tomorrow is going to be equally as busy.

Thomas French - Similarly, really. We've had a great day here at BIBA, lots of private client brokers, but lots of other brokers who are interested in getting into the Private Clients world, talking to us and exploring around their options and how they would get into that space and how they could work more closely with us. So we've been very busy like you, Matt. We've had lots of interactions, lots more to go this afternoon and throughout the rest of the week as well. It's been a brilliant event so far.

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