In Person: Adrian Saunders spells out his top priorities for Ecclesiastical

Ecclesiastical's commercial director on his role, profitability, growth and restructuring at the insurer

Saunders wastes no time in laying out his top priorities for the year ahead.

His remit, he says, is profitability and stable growth across all the business areas. “And we only achieve that by increasing our engagement with brokers,” he adds. 

He saw problems with the structure of the separate brands and wanted both of them to be better aligned so they “can get closer to the brokers it works for and broaden out that base”. 

Resources
Saunders and his team took a step back to look at the field team and resources it had.

When it came to 2016 the company effectively had three separate sales teams including, the Ecclesiastical team, the sales team and an Ansvar team.

“That didn’t make our proposition to brokers as clear as we wanted it to be,” he says. 

Saunders then made two significant changes. The first saw him create a single field force team and within that introduce two discreet roles.

“We've created a development underwriting management role recognising that actually brokers want more empowered decision-making but closer to them.

"Alongside the development underwriter role, we've also got business development managers working with larger panels of our brokers but both roles are achieving the same thing.

“Any one broker now has a single point of contact regardless of whether they want to talk to us about Ecclesiastical products, an Ansvar product or schemes opportunities,” he says.

Identity
A second theme Saunders was keen to focus on was the separate identities of Ecclesiastical and Ansvar. 

“By having a single sales team we have been far clearer and communicated with our broker partners around what the proposition is for Ansvar, and what the proposition for Ecclesiastical is.

“Effectively, Ansvar is our centre of excellence for SME business… which writes high ticket small volume niche products… that's where sub £5,000 business is written,” says Saunders.

“That leaves our Ecclesiastical businesses where all of our regional offices are. They handle new business, renewals, mid-term alterations and everything that goes on in the vast cycle of the policy.

"That means our Ecclesiastical business and colleagues can focus on underwriting bigger ticket more complex business in our niches.

“Those two things are really the significant pieces of positioning that we've done in 2016.”

This strategy, which was developed in the back end of 2015, when Saunders had only occupied the role for around a year was very important to him.

He wanted to be seen as expanding the broker base for Ecclesiastical. The journey has been “good”, he says confidently, talking over the effects of the strategy six months down the line.

Saunders is frank: “We've definitely seen the early impacts of the development underwriting roles in the market. We've certainly seen a benefit of the expansion of our broker base. 

“It’s safe to say that both brands are now working with some different brokers and we are seeing some benefit in that.

"I think looking ahead, what it's also informed us about is the need to look at how we can continue to develop the distribution for small ticket business.”

E-trading
He has also recognised the need for more e-trading capabilities. For instance, faith online – a new venture, will be a way in which Saunders and his team can deliver a better proposition to brokers.

This type of business will see contracts completed on a web platform. 

“I am confident that as we go into 2017 e-trading will become an increasing part of the mix for our Ansvar business,” he says.

“Less so for Ecclesiastical because its focus is really on bigger ticket business and bespoke underwriting.”

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