Executive Outlook 2022: Andy Taylor, Gore Mutual

Andy Taylor, CEO, Gore Mutual

The industry can be proud of how we’ve managed through the pandemic as it balanced innovation, resilience and compassion for employees, customers and brokers.

We need to continue to plan for black swan events that led to the pandemic. Some of the capital management work that we’ve done helped us but we obviously didn’t know which event was going to hit us. The pandemic has reinforced the need for the insurance industry to throw away traditional thinking and innovate for what the world will look like moving forward.

As we enter the third year of our Next Horizon strategic transformation — 2022 will be probably our biggest year. With the completion of our personal lines transformation, we expect to see continued, strong business growth as we realize the benefits of our new scalable, cloud-based technology platforms and operating models. The final phase of that transformation will be the launch of an entirely new commercial lines platform on the cloud in 2022.

These enhancements allow us to be more agile, and offer brokers and customers streamlined processes, enhanced products and customized pricing.

The biggest change next year will be managing the reopening of the economies and the return to work. There are many conflicting and balancing factors. We’re seeing claims frequencies already returning to pre-pandemic levels. That is going to be a dynamic the industry is going to have to work through.

Gore Mutual employees and brokers will see the full launch of our new Toronto office and our Next Normal future-of-work model. We will leverage our three offices with a flexible virtual national workforce.

The term we use is flexibility with a framework. If you’re doing video calls all day long, you can do those from home. But if you’re coming in, there should be collaborative work. There needs to be a framework that we overlay to create the culture we’re trying to develop.

Retaining and attracting top talent next year will be harder than ever because you’ve got all the different companies launching new models, and they’re all going to be very different models. Who are the winners and how do you retain and attract your talent?

See all the 2022 Outlooks here.