The current crisis has prompted increased demand for certain iPipeline products, including its e-sign solution AlphaTrust and its SSG Digital platform, which offers “end-to-end capability”.
Mr Teague says: “It’s a digital platform that’s enabling providers – the likes of The Exeter who also use the Alpha Trust capability – in terms of their claims process to operate effectively, and the likes of Zurich and Aviva to still write volumes of business and support their customer base.”
He adds: “Our lead generation tool has proven critical for our distribution partners to generate new leads and new opportunities in this time.”
Demonstrating agility
Helping providers and distributors through the Covid-19 crisis is clearly important for Mr Teague and his team at iPipeline. But how has the company and its 180 UK employees adapted operationally to working from home?
He recalls they began reassessing their plans in early to mid-February, in an effort to be “in a position where we could positively and proactively invoke working from home before it was absolutely needed”.
He adds: “But we now have our full team working from home and working very effectively supporting our customers.
“Our focus is on how we become more efficient and effective, how we still engage and collaborate as a team.
“If you’d asked me six months ago whether I was going to have 180 people working from home, I would have said ‘No, that’s a crazy idea’.
“But needs must, and we adapt our thinking and processes to make it work.”
Mr Teague asserts that the team is having more meetings and more discussions with its partners under lockdown than ever before.
“Nobody has a magic wand to make it all better, but we do have some capability and it is around relationships. It’s about being that trusted partner, helping through the difficult times,” he points out.
He is keen to see the industry emerge from the crisis in a stronger position and says his company has started to consider what the post-lockdown world will look like.
At iPipeline, the team has concluded that it will have accelerated some of the thinking and the journey the industry was already on.
In a time of crisis, things that people said were not possible are suddenly getting delivered, Mr Teague observes.
“There are people in the market today who are very agile, who are finding opportunities to grow, as a result of the lockdown.
“But there are also those who are struggling with multiple back-office systems, poor technology or digital capabilities that are finding it more difficult.
“We are seeing a greater impetus post-crisis to drive those digital agendas even faster and harder than they were being pushed before.”
