Most insurers struggle with social capital
Over 80% of insurance executives believe their firms are struggling to manage social capital, according to a Finity survey.
The survey found 62% believed their organisations were “a long way behind” best practice and a further 21% said they were “doing nothing effective in this area”.
Social capital, Finity said, was the state of a company’s relationships with shareholders, customers, staff, and other stakeholders.
Finity principal, Hadyn Bernau, said: “The organisations I’m talking with are increasingly dissatisfied with their current approaches and measurement tools, and are looking for new frameworks that better identify relationship weaknesses and blind spots, and provide leading indicators”.
Finity said it was introducing a methodology called Relational Analytics to help companies build a clearer picture of their social conditions through the lens of stakeholder relationships.
Bernau said this methodology could have predicted and potentially prevented much of the recent public loss of trust in the financial sector.
“Communication is increasingly mediated by technology, relationships are more transactional and lack continuity with specific company representatives, leaving customers feeling unheard and less connected to the typical large organisation,” he said.
Bernau noted that failure to address weaknesses in governance and culture could result in major financial losses through reputational damage, fines, and expensive remediation programs.
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