Latitude Financial Services

A track record of design, experimentation and innovation success for over 10 years.

Designing and testing new insurance offers

The Brief

With increased regulation across the Australian insurance industry landscape, coupled with cost pressures and navigating through a pandemic, Latitude wanted to emerge from this season with a future focus, growth-driven strategy that would set them up for long term success. Customer needs, particularly those related to general insurance, have shifted dramatically, new entrants are shifting the market with purely digital propositions, and the potential for Latitude to bring more value to their customers was evident.From the start the Latitude team wanted a personalised offer via pay-as-you-go models, achieved by re-envisioning nimbleness in underwriting practices. Insurance needs an identity beyond status quo, anchored by purpose and values in relation to their customers. Putting the customer experience first and doing right by them will bullet-proof an insurance business model, and this is exactly what Latitude needed to stand out in the insurance industry.In order to create a potentially disruptive insurance experience they needed to approach this with a bold and brave vision and an innovation mindset.

The Approach

The engagement involved an 8-week discovery phase, with the NA team working closely with the core Insurance SME team from Latitude. This work utilised both an outside-in and inside-out approach to identify opportunity areas for growth and disruption. This included looking at trends in insurance and adjacent industries and identifying gaps that Latitude could fill.

The discovery research also allowed us to better understand current and potential Latitude customer’s perspectives, their challenges, motivations, and behaviours in the context of insurance, while also identifying trends amongst the customer base and wider industry.

As moving at speed was essential in this project, we used a combination of design thinking and business model experimentation during the discovery phase. Aiming to define good business model patterns while also conducting design research.

Once we had the evidence we needed, that this proposition was desirable for Latitude’s customers, we moved into a design and test phase. It was essential that we took a co-creation approach with Latitude’s internal teams and external SMEs – a blended team that was able to flex as we moved through several cycles of build – test- learn with the prototype.

Several concepts were developed and tested with potential customers – specifically designed to test the critical assumptions identified in the discovery phase. The features prioritised for testing represented the core value proposition + initial insights. Overall, the understanding of customer behaviour beyond wants, how decisions are made based on priorities and needs, allowed Latitude to create behavioural nudges to further test not only want customers wanted but also what they needed to be covered when it came to claiming.

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The Result

Throughout this process we were able to develop a customer led strategy for a new digital proposition that was endorsed by Latitude’s Board, as well as a refined and tested prototype and roadmap for delivery.

The Latitude team rallied around the new strategy and new opportunities to expand into a start-up like digital business backed by the enterprise. However, as new opportunities arose for the business, the future trajectory of "Latitude Insurance" took a change of course, and in August 2022 the decision was made by Latitude to sell the Insurance business to the St Andrew Insurance Group so that they could instead focus their people and resources on their core business.

Nevertheless, the Latitude team are still reaping benefits from the design experience, and are confident that this new digital product is the right proposition for future insurance businesses to invest in.

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“Partnering with Naked Ambition and the approach that we took together on this project was a really great experience. We could not have thrown more curve balls or objectives at the Naked Ambition team, but they handled it with grace, style and expertise.”
– Jo Mikleus, Executive General Manager of Latitude’s Insurance business

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In the development of this offer Latitude’s team was pushed beyond their comfort zone into areas of ambiguity. While challenging, this resulted in a huge mindset shift amongst their team, who now envision future opportunities for growth in this new era at Latitude.

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