Moving forwards with confidence & optimism
Publish date: 06/01/2021
This year’s global pandemic has proven to be both a distinct business risk and an amplifier of existing business trends, strengths, and weaknesses, presenting large businesses with a significant management dilemma – survive and endure or innovate and invest.
Focusing upon mere survival may seem the prudent approach as the economy slows. Capturing new growth is no longer a top priority and the focus shifts to short term issues, maintaining business continuity and tightening your operational footprint.
But there are risks to hunkering-down. Closing ranks and cutting costs can result in a reduction in value for customers, and businesses with a purely inward focus risk losing sight of the competition, investment in innovation suffers and businesses risk watching competitors gain market share.
Prioritising innovation today is the key to unlocking postpandemic growth. Challenging economic times create significant new opportunities - to create a better solution, invest in your customer proposition and be proactive in terms of differentiation. Yet seeing the opportunities emerging is not the same as being able to seize them.
Here at FMG, 2020 has been a year of development; new processes, new technologies, re-writing infrastructure and driving innovations. With the financial stability of our PLC parentage coupled with the autonomy and trust to act upon our own vision and insight, we have focused on opportunities and moved forward with optimism to create a wave of new innovations:
• A new and enhanced agnostic risk management solution - designed to prevent vehicle incidents from happening in the first place. Our new risk solution specialises in the aggregation and normalisation of journey data from multiple hardware sources.
• Investment in FMG Repair Services - the acquisition and vertical integration of Nationwide Accident Repair Services into our quality-certified network of vehicle repairers broadens our end to end repair capabilities.
• Development of a new omni-channel communication facility – ‘Claim Web Access’ will provide a self-service facility to allow insurers, brokers and policyholders instant access to claims information using a range of devices.
It remains prudent for businesses to think in the short and medium term whilst adjusting to the challenges this year has presented, but don’t let that stump the ability to adapt and innovate to futureproof, or you may wake up to find that the storm has passed but your ship’s pointing in the wrong direction.