Driving change in auto-renewals at a leading insurance organisation

Grayce Analyst, Chris Sixsmith, shares his experience supporting an auto-renewals workstream at a leading insurance organisation. 

I’m currently an L3 Senior Project Analyst on the Grayce Development Programme. I’ve been on assignment with a leading insurance organisation since December 2018 working in a Business Analyst capacity within their BA team in CIO. My current role is working on the Regulatory Change Portfolio on the Pricing Practices programme. 

Enhancing auto-renewals 

My primary focus has been on the auto-renewals workstream, where firms must offer a range of options for consumers who want to cancel auto-renewal on their contract. This applies to all retail general insurance products. As part of my role, I’m responsible for supporting the workstream team in defining our product scope for the General Insurance products that offer auto-renewing functionality.

My role involves eliciting requirement by engaging with a wide range of stakeholders from our Compliance team, Product Owners and Operations, alongside many more, to identify the various auto-renewals related changes required. These include:

• Content and Functional Sales journey changes (both online and call centre) to provide the consumer with information requirements and ability to opt-out of auto-renewals. 
• Product Literature / Documentation changes to provide the information requirements. 
• Operational and System changes to divorce the auto-renewal process.

I also document these requirements using the software tool Jira and use Confluence to create pages to display supporting programme documentation. I now have regular engagements with 3rd party suppliers who will support the delivery of the changes identified based on the requirements provided to ensure we are all aligned.

Recently, I have also started to work closely on supporting the build of our approach on wider Broker / Partnership Engagements in the programme. Taking on a governance role to ensure we’re bringing together all the individual workstream deliverables across Pricing Practices and support in developing the approach on how these are to be delivered with our Broker/Partners, when my client is not solely responsible for the delivery.

This programme is helping to reduce the amount of harm experienced, increase transparency with consumers and improve the overall way the general insurance market operates, to ensure fair value is always provided. It has meant that my client has had to drive innovation and transformation from various aspects of their operating model, including digital-related changes such as auto-renewals content and functionality changes, with a focus on consumer experience being of the utmost importance in the delivery of these changes.   

The key skills and successes  

The top three skills I feel I have utilised the most during this programme are: 

Analytical and Critical thinking– managing discussions in various workshops with a variety of stakeholders and interpreting/understanding the requirements, to be able to document these effectively using the S.M.A.R.T. technique. 

Adaptability – Being able to flexibly adapt to different working environments on a regular basis. Working under pressure to deliver to short timescales, owning workstreams deliverables and process improvements. 

Stakeholder Management – Using my past experiences and approaches with various stakeholders on projects / programmes to tailor my communication approach to suit the audience and their varying levels of authority, to ensure the required outcomes are achieved for the deliverables in question. 

A notable success of my time on this programmes far has been creating and supporting the rolling out of a Roles and Responsibilities matrix that defines how we have apportioned responsibility between the client and our Broker/Partners who must make the required changes for the workstream in question, depending on current contractual obligations. However, as this is currently an ongoing project, my biggest achievement I feel will be when the auto-renewals changes have been fully deployed, knowing the change I have supported in defining has been implemented and how beneficial it will be to the consumers’ experience. 

‘Not many graduates get this exposure and opportunities available so early on in their careers’

I think my client uses Grayce because of the drive and determination of our colleagues to get stuck in and willingness to support the client in the capacity required, delivering outcomes successfully and adding value from the offset. 

My personal experience with Grayce has been nothing but positive, I love how much knowledge and experience I’ve gained working on such high-profile change programmes with complex but rewarding deliverables alongside, the exposure to a variety of stakeholders including director-level colleagues. Not many graduates get this exposure and opportunities available so early on in their careers, which is why I am ever grateful for the Grayce Development Programmes, and was also one of the main elements that attracted me to Grayce in the first place. On top of this, the extensive training budget and opportunities provided demonstrates Grayce’s commitment and drive to develop their employees into change, tech and data leaders of the future.