The weather settling in outside right now got me thinking about today’s blog topic: That the insurance marketplace is about as fluid as molasses on a cold winter’s day.  It should run as freely as water, but instead it is bogged down and sluggish. One specific failure is that the industry fails to rapidly connect willing buyers with willing sellers on optimal terms, as happens readily in most other marketplaces. As a result, the insurance marketplace fails to function well — particularly for the buyer.

Insurance is replete with a bizarre set of dynamics that create friction and inertia in the market transacation process, which in turn prevents the process from moving about rapidly and efficiently. The end result is that most buyers are not matched with the optimal sellers for the services they’re seeking, and buyers end up paying higher prices and getting poorer service as a result. They become stuck wherever luck or fate (or their broker) landed them in terms of policies and pricing, and the forces of friction and inertia in the insurance industry conspire to keep them right there in the future.

What we seek to do through our work is to liquify this sluggish marketplace.  We heat up the molasses by helping our clients getting informed, organized, and prepared. We set them up so that they can access and sample any portion of the marketplace with the push of a button. We teach brokers that our clients expect, and deserve, rapid and excellent service.

Why shouldn’t a buyer interrogate the entire marketplace every time they spend money? If you were going to buy a car, would you simply drive up to the first lot you found and purchase whatever the salesperson there was suggesting? Buying insurance should be no different — except that additional steps will be necessary since the auto industry is a much more ‘liquified’ and competitive marketpace for buyers than insurance.

All we are doing is warming things up a bit, and helping the market flow along better. Believe me, it’s in desperate need of a little heat.

- Don