Cosmin (INSEAD 2012) joined Admiral as an International Pricing Manager in our SPARK Leadership Program in 2012. He has had a unique journey which led him to start up and now lead the Travel Insurance department. We caught up with Cosmin to find out more about his experience.
Cosmin (INSEAD 2012) joined Admiral as an International Pricing Manager in our SPARK Leadership Program in 2012. He has had a unique journey which led him to start up and now lead the Travel Insurance department. We caught up with Cosmin to find out more about his experience.
How did you end up launching travel insurance?
My pricing experience gave me the confidence to know how to do something well, but I was looking for something a little bit broader to apply that knowledge to. That is what made me look at wider business opportunities and there was a good case for creating a travel insurance product. If you look at the travel market in terms of volumes, it's relatively small compared to motor or household, but if you look at the number of people buying it, it's around 35 million and there’s an interesting overlap in terms of profiles between our household book and potential travel book. This means that travel brings you a flow of new customers. We also had confidence in the claims data and wider research we had done. Travel insurance was the most popular product that people expressed an interest in buying from Admiral. Finally, I felt there was a lot of room to disrupt this market and challenge the status quo, which made it a really exciting challenge.How has COVID-19 impacted our travel insurance product?
Our IT system is quite different from what you see in the market giving us fantastic agility to adapt to changes. In the case of Covid-19, there were a few nerves in the beginning, but we addressed them as a team. We always think about the opportunities of any situation and take on the challenges as a team. After all, we are an insurance company, so we do know a little bit about risk!We need to look at what’s happening with COVID-19 from the right perspective – this is likely a one-off event that nobody has any control over that won’t happen again for another hundred years. Covid-19 won’t make travel less attractive in the long run and it increases the awareness around the need for a good travel insurance product. In the UK, there is already a higher demand for travel insurance and customers want a good product. We have already made changes to make it better, including giving people more flexibility about cancellations. It allows people to cancel without any kind of penalty and covers them for COVID-19-related medical emergencies while abroad.
The customer is always at the centre of what we do at Admiral. We have always adapted to change and disrupted the market since our humble beginnings in 1993, and that is what we will continue to do. I’m excited to see what the future brings!
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