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Bancassurance, Personality and Gamification

 

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What makes a bancassurance operation successful?

Multiple factors, depending on the product, operating costs, and a long list of soft spots that keep industry executives awake. But if we focus on those products that require a particular organizational management, where each bank employee from the first line of contact with clients requires developing expertise and a capacity to adapt to new products and services, or the ability to extend their administrative functions by adding the sale of products, the situation can become chaotic and uphill.

What role does personality play in the learning process? What does it mean that personality makes a productive response more likely in a bancassurance operation? Faced with a novel set of information that could transform the way of understanding and acting on reality, how can different actors in the banking and insurance process be integrated into a system that discourages them from transforming their attitude towards new insurance products and the learning process?

Between 2012 and 2016, I had the opportunity to lead a complex research and development process on consumer insurance for one of the largest bancassurance operations in Latin America. This gave me a unique perspective to understand how to integrate two great product cultures, which do not have a common history, much less a similar marketing operation. The organization was in the dilemma of expanding its distribution process and thought that by turning to ethnography it could better understand consumers who were outside the banking system and therefore the insurance system. And they were not wrong. With an external look at the traditional process, we integrated design, economic anthropology, engineering and technology to design a distribution system that ended up covering more than 35 thousand points of sale, still in force. The novelty, in addition to the interdisciplinary work that meant living with consumers of all types and levels, was the incorporation of gamification in the network of solutions, something extremely novel for a time where it was not yet understood enough how to explain in a simple way , didactic and playful the complex concepts of the insurance system.

Using design thinking, we designed a set of tools and processes that, placed in context, made ordinary people far from complex insurance systems change their attitudes towards risk and towards insurance products in a few minutes. In one of the experiences, which later led to training instruments for the distribution points, the public was presented with a simple set consisting of sheets and images that explained what insurance is, the branches it covers, the protection it brings, the role of the insurance company in managing risk and the way to acquire products, especially life. More than 80% of the people reached responded actively to the invitation to the game, stating that they were very interested in seriously evaluating the acquisition of an insurance product for themselves and their families.

Anthropologists have been studying for decades the intense relationship that exists between culture and personality. All cultures produce in a certain way a basic and at the same time deep personality structure that we can find and observe in the individual members of said culture, dissecting behaviors and motivations that are usually united by common interests. In the cited example, the cultural background of the personality allowed us to visualize these relationships and build meaningful relationships between banking and insurance, recognizing each organized group of individuals in a different cultural framework from each other, and whose repeated reactions, in practice, They are usually determined as the foundation for all technical phenomena that occur to generate a positive response to the commercial operation.

And although the interrelationships between psychological, social and cultural aspects are capable of providing functional and interdependent tools, this view is usually absent in the traditional development plans and models of bancassurance programs, and its absence is usually the main cause of their inability to grow and go beyond showing insurance in a commodity. Not by chance, it is one of the least persistent businesses in the industry.

For the insurance industry, risk, foresight and protection have been an essential condition of its raw material for decades. Although forecasting and savings form a fine binding line between banking and insurance companies, both categories have advanced together for less than 50 years, with the joint action in commercial linkage processes being relatively new in order to use the massive management of bank clients such as opportunity to distribute insurance.

As in other functional areas, in financial services there are profound differences that make a banking executive who has been promoting consumption and investments for years, perceive the reality of his work differently, in relation to how an executive in the insurance industry understands it. Although both are within the spectrum of what we call financial services, the insurance industry has a very different origin and character from that of banking, whose subscription is usually faster and more massive.

Both organizational cultures tend to go down different tracks, which causes both cultures not to integrate easily.

 

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