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After three terms as president of the College of Insurance Mediators of A Coruña, Juan Manuel Sánchez-Albornoz has just taken office for the fourth time to continue leading an entity that is currently experiencing a delicate situation due to the consequences for the insurance sector from the economic crisis caused by the pandemic, to which they are trying to adapt to continue their advisory work. Health and death insurance are the beneficiaries of the current situation.
What encourages you to take charge of the A Coruña mediators once again?
The board of directors had a project for the school and times are very hard for the profession, as for everyone, and it seemed that it was not the time for changes and that the best thing was to continue with a project that we already had mature.
How is this crisis affecting insurance?
In the absence of economic activity, this is evident in the contracting of insurance. If the bar is closed, the owner chooses not to pay the insurance, if I have half the warehouses of my ship, I pay only half the insurance and if I do not export or do not sell, the civil liability insurance or that of the employees cut them in half. Insurance is closely linked to economic activity and whatever happens in it affects it directly.
Is it one of the first expenses in which both companies and individuals are cut in these situations?
It is one of the expenses in which you try to cut because sometimes you do not see the need for insurance or you play randomly trying to make sure nothing happens. But we say that it is the other way around, that in moments of crisis it is just when things happen because security drops in companies, the facilities are not cleaned and maintained as before, and that is when accidents occur. At a particular level, the same thing happens, because when the gutters are cleaned or the windows, pipes or an old appliance are changed, it is more likely that there will not be an accident.
Is there any type of insurance that has benefited from this situation?
Health insurance has risen a lot because health has become a much more valued good. The end of last year, which is when these insurances are usually contracted, has been crazy, since there was a lot of offer to capture all that market. And another specialty, which is also very Galician, that of deaths, has also grown a lot because we Galicians have always been concerned about burial. There are clients who tell us that with this situation they cannot leave the burial problem to the families because death can occur at any time. Galicia has always been the place in Spain where death insurance was hired the most, but the pandemic has made us see that death can be there and that burial costs are high.
Why is there so much demand in Galicia for these insurances?
I believe that it is part of our culture, with the funerals, the burial, the niche at the foot of the church in the villages, the visits to the cemeteries and how they are integrated into the towns. In fact, the main Spanish funeral companies, Ocaso and Santa Lucía, were created in A Coruña.
How have the pandemic restrictions hurt insurance intermediaries? Because the difference with respect to the internet was direct attention.
You have to adapt because the moments are complicated. We were declared an essential activity and we have freedom of movement to visit clients and attend to claims, but it is true that this is not the best time to do so. We have adapted to the telephone, video conferencing and email to be very close to the client with new technologies because they have to feel that we are there and close. It has been a time for clients to perceive that we were at their side and from school we tried to transfer it to the collegiate.
Have you lost a lot of clients because of direct hiring online?
Competition on the one hand hurts you because it can steal market share, but on the other it makes you wake up and sharpen your wits. More than the internet, which is a very specific segment for young people, who is doing a lot of damage to mediation is the banking with the sale of insurance linked to their activity, such as accounts and mortgages, in which they reduce commissions or rates to change your hiring. The Law assists us because it recognizes that the consumer must be free to contract, but when a credit, mortgage or commissions from an account are linked to the contracting of insurance, the client is being forced a little to do so.
What are the advantages of contracting insurance through a mediator?
The consumer has to see that the mediator is a professional who knows his business and who advises him, because the policies and their terminology are complicated. And also, you have to hire what each one needs.
Insurance companies always complain about fraud that some customers try to commit. I suppose that in his career he will have encountered unlikely situations.
There are two types of fraud. First there is the one who has a real accident and wants to take advantage of it to fix something else, as happens with cars when it is said that there is a blow to a headlight and it is ensured that a scratch on the side was also caused by that accident. And then there is the blatant fraud for a claim that has not occurred, sometimes only by word and sometimes through a strategy about what has happened. They are all very repetitive, since the most typical thing is to say that they have broken into the house and that they had a watch that was worth a lot of money or a large television in a certain piece of furniture and then the expert sees that in it he could not fit or there was no socket for the antenna. People also believe that with these practices they are deceiving the company, but in the end we are all deceiving ourselves because insurance is still an economic activity and if money is lost the following year, their policies are raised.
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