One of the largest transatlantic general insurance companies, the client has over 23,000 employees, 20+ million customers, and a strong and growing presence in emerging Asian markets.

While insurance as a product is well-understood and has strong demand, it’s not immune to the change in customer expectations brought about by a more digital and connected world. While traditional insurance products remain the main money-spinners, more providers are pivoting to new-age insurance needs brought about by new-age risk models.

The key to understanding and staying a step ahead of these opportunities is to be agile in your vision and operations, and that’s why we were brought into the picture.

Insurance as an industry is unfriendly to innovations as it functions in a highly regulated environment. This often results in a company missing out on opportunities as the focus is more on protecting the downside (from a regulatory and market perspective) as opposed to maximising the upside - in terms of identifying new opportunities, driving innovation, gaining a competitive advantage, and becoming more resilient.

To achieve this change in mindset, we conducted a design-thinking workshop where we matched SMEs within the company to business-critical problems.

The focus was to empower these experts to come up with innovative solutions to a given problem while keeping the overall customer experience as the North Star.

Spanning 4 days, this in-person and guided workshop involved multiple teams being introduced to the design thinking process. Each team was further assigned a mentor from our side, to help it create and pitch a solution using this process.

The workshop culminated with a pitch from each team to a panel of C-suite executives, with the winning proposal getting funded to deliver on its idea within 6 months.

Our design thinking workshop was an overwhelming success as it scored an impressive 94% in NPS ratings. It was also well-received across the company’s leadership and drew participation from 200+ people, apart from a well-attended and eager in-person audience.

This approach enabled the company to quickly move forward with innovative ideas and solutions, demonstrating a newfound agility in addressing market challenges.