Insurance (Broker and Affinity)

Rob Smale

Claims Director, Ageas

Married with 3 daughters and living in Hampshire. Originally I worked as a mining engineer in the UK, South Africa and the Czech Republic before entering the insurance industry in 1996.

Joined Fortis Insurance Ltd(now Ageas Insurance Ltd) in 2003 where as Claims and Operations Director in a multi award winning company selling insurance via partners my job is to help differentiate Ageas to partners and customers alike.

My teams aspire to ambitious levels of service for our partner's customers. To achieve these ambitions we often find ourselves doing "stuff differently" to a point where we believe there exists a distinctive “Ageas Way”. The Ageas Way has been developed by the Ageas operational leadership team from the Toyota Production System and the work of W.E. Deming and J Seddon. Customers, partners and suppliers all confirm our distinctiveness as do the customer surveys and benchmarking studies performed by the industry and our partners.

At present my teams are expanding to deal with the claims that will result from the large volume of newly acquired partner business Ageas has won in 2010 e.g. TescoBank, Toyota etc. The Claims and Operations team and the Ageas Way were integral to these partner’s decisions to choose Ageas.
We operate from two UK sites and number 1000 FTE in Claims and Operations. My teams provide a 24/7/365 service to customers claiming on their personal and commercial policies, provide policy administration to our 2500 broker partners and provide the sales and service function to Age UK’s insurance customers.

I believe an ingredient in our distinctiveness stems from a very careful selection of KPI i.e. we don’t have any. KPIs are one of a list of fashionable “must dos” that we in Ageas Claims and Operations, don’t do. What we do is provide high levels of customer satisfaction at very low cost.