Insurers must pivot to become ‘more customer-centric’

Insurers must pivot to become “more customer-centric” – rather than solely focused on products or looking internally – if they are to become “more efficient” at meeting risk professionals’ needs, according to Christian Kanu, chief executive at Generali Global Corporate and Commercial.

Kanu was speaking at the FERMA Forum 2026 in Rotterdam (5 October 2026) as part of a plenary session entitled ‘CEO Panel’. Joining him on the main stage was Luciano Cirina, chief executive of international commercial at Zurich Insurance Group, Alessa Quane, chief executive of international markets at Sompo Group, and session chair Laurent Nihoul, chief executive at FERMA.

Kanu emphasised that the insurance industry needed to take a leaf out of the banking sector’s book if it wanted “to be better at serving our customers” – this would include, for example, organising propositions around clients or industries rather than lines of business and becoming more “customer-centric rather than product or [internal] looking”.

He added: “This, for me, is something extremely important. We need to become much more efficient regarding [risk managers’] needs.”

Kanu highlighted that one way to achieve this ambition was to move away from “yearly programmes”, closely mirroring the comments made by FERMA president Philippe Cotell in his opening address.

Kanu explained: “We have yearly programmes, but the risk, the client exposure and the decision [around] investment tends to be much longer. That’s the kind of evolution that we should do. We [have] already started a lot of alternative risk products and also with long-term agreements, but I think there is some room for improvement.”

Areas of innovation

During the panel discussion, Kanu additionally ringfenced where he saw certain innovations having a market-wide impact.

For example, Kanu flagged that the MGA marketplace had a distinct role in the insurance ecosystem as these smaller, often more streamlined businesses are ideal for launching and testing new products. In his opinion, smaller teams tend to generate greater innovation.

He added that MGAs were typically the breeding ground for new insurance products until these became “mainstream” lines of business – as a result of this trajectory, these forward thinking MGAs would subsequently be snapped up in M&A.

Another area of innovation, Kanu noted, was the “acceleration” of parametric insurance policies – where a pre-agreed lump sum of compensation is paid to the policyholder when a pre-defined trigger is met or a specific event occurs.

For Kanu, parametric policies have proved to be “a very safe and useful product” that is “here to stay” because the structure of these products have become incredibly “more relevant” over the last six to seven years.

He explained: “Parametric is a product that has been around for many years, but has had an acceleration because of external factors. The quality of data [now] has really enabled us to better define this product.

“Also, talking about parametric related to natural catastrophe, clearly [there has been an] acceleration [of interest] due to climate change in the last 10 years – a lot of catastrophes, in particular the secondary perils, and [this has] really pushed for [an] increased need for such protection.”

Despite this positivity, Kanu added that he does not see parametric policies “as a standalone product, but something that goes together with more traditional property coverage”.

Kanu further noted that how businesses buy insurance will evolve too over the next 10 years, following the trajectory of distribution routes in the personal lines insurance market.