At a high level, we expect 2024 to be a challenging year for the industry. We have no clear picture on where interest rates may land when approximately half of Canadian mortgages renew in 2025, and we have historic levels of household debt. International turmoil will continue to inject volatility into financial markets. This will affect insurers, which in turn impacts how they work with brokers. All of this will potentially influence auto and property insurance premiums for consumers.
Consumer expectations will continue to evolve. As we’ve come out of the challenges of COVID-19, consumers have become significantly more comfortable with online purchases of products and services. Additionally, demographic changes are putting pressure on how people interact with their providers. ‘Easier’ and ‘faster’ have become tablestakes and objectives in themselves. Combined with shrinking consumer attention spans, there’s an increasing demand for solutions achieving these goals.
We believe 2024 will see a more competitive landscape emerge in the broker management systems (BMS) and managing general agencies (MGA) markets. We will provide enhanced solutions for both.
The industry will see some benefits of artificial intelligence start to emerge; most likely, this will be in the new customer on-boarding space. Direct writers have been focusing on this aspect for the past four to five years and are becoming very sophisticated. The broker channel will start to benefit from this in 2024.
A trend established decades ago — the consolidation of brokers and insurers — will continue throughout 2024. Broker technology will compete vigorously by offering solutions providing creative, new products and services to meet changing and growing customer needs.
Carriers, brokers and MGAs are starting to vie among each other for competitive advantage. They are asking the question, “If we all use the same tools, how can we retain, develop, and deploy solutions that materially offer a competitive advantage?”
We’ve taken up this challenge and have made it a cornerstone of everything we will do for 2024 and beyond.
