Amy McNeece takes on embedded partnerships at Chubb

When Amy McNeece took on the role of managing Chubb’s partnerships with non-insurance companies for its new digital consumer insurance business in North America, she had to “get comfortable with being uncomfortable,” she says.

Prior to taking the position two years ago, she had built an expertise in the high-net-worth division of Chubb’s personal risk services business, establishing trust and credibility with independent agents and brokers in the space. Then, in her new job, she suddenly found herself working with a new digital platform, a new team and a new set of insurance products that she had no experience with. “It was incredibly uncomfortable in the beginning, to go from having this deep expertise to just getting started,” she says, laughing.

“It was a completely different way of thinking about insurance; it was reimagining it and how it could work and how it could be embedded through non-insurance companies,” she says. “I had been working for a business I had been around for over 30 years and now I was trying to start something from scratch.”

McNeece had started to dabble in digital insurance four years ago, even as she managed the New York region of the high-net-worth division, with her region accounting for over $1 billion in annual written premium–about 20% of the division’s business. “We were starting to think about new and different ways we could bring insurance to customers who were looking for high-end insurance,” she says. 

A luxury e-commerce retailer that specializes in watches—a Chubb customer–asked about building an insurance offering for its customers. So McNeece worked with product, technology and business management teams at Chubb to create from scratch an embedded insurance option in the retailer’s app.

From there, McNeece started building distribution in the niche, looking at how Chubb could tailor the product to digitally savvy customers. “Within different parts of the organization in North America, there were a lot of people starting to think about embedded insurance, digitizing the insurance process and building out the API technology that was required to do it,” she says. 

In one example of how embedded insurance could work, a customer of the luxury e-commerce retailer riding in a New York City taxi took a photo of his watch, answered five questions on the retailer’s app and purchased insurance on the watch, all within 10 minutes. “That’s the type of experience that we’re building across the board with multiple partnerships,” McNeece says. 

Chubb noted the success it had with the retailer partner and decided to scale up the North America business under one umbrella, and McNeece was appointed to manage the new portfolio. To evaluate potential partners for embedded digital insurance, she came up with a tool that enables the company to prioritize the best partner candidates and replicate where they have had success.

“We have a good idea of what it means for an embedded insurance partnership to work,” she says: It has to add value for the customer who ends up buying the insurance; to be relevant, contextual, accessible and easy to purchase; to add value for the partner, with revenue, customer retention or brand loyalty; and there must be a technology match so the insurance offering embeds seamlessly into customer experience.

“If they decide to offer insurance, that means that they’re giving trust and credibility to Chubb to give us shelf space that they otherwise could be selling another one of their products,” McNeece says. “We have to make sure that it is incredibly meaningful to them.”

McNeese and her colleagues developed Chubb’s go-to-market strategy from research into customer behavior and their beliefs about insurance gaps and their pain points, such as ease of getting insurance for luxury e-commerce purchases. “We homed in on the products and services that we know are resonating in the market,” she says.

Another selling point was emphasizing Chubb’s credibility in the market as the largest insurer of private collections, such as paintings and other art, jewelry, wine and collectables like trading cards, coins and stamps.

Despite the differences between traditional and embedded insurance, McNeece has found that building relationships is still an essential part of her new role.

“Even though we live in a digital age and even though we’re talking about selling insurance in this digital ecosystem, you still have to be able to trust the person on the other side,” McNeece says. “The number one item that I lean into every day is that it still comes down to relationships. It still comes down to real face-to-face human interaction, listening, collaboration, strategic alignment and building trust.”