Delivering the benefits of a mutual status
The insurance business has set itself ambitious targets to significantly increase its customer base, even though 95% of policies are already renewed every year. As the UK's leading rural insurer, NFU Mutual’s network of over 295 Agency offices across the country serves a customer base that is around 50% farming, as well as a range of rural businesses and individuals.
NFU Mutual is halfway through a 10-year investment programme to modernise its IT infrastructure that will be transformational. The programme will automate low-value and legacy processes, enable new capability, refresh products and create much greater agility in the business.
This is where Barclays is playing an important role, working with the company on several digital transformation projects. These include the integration of NFU Mutual’s new treasury management system with Barclays’ systems via API and host-to-host technology, deploying a Barclaycard gateway solution for the company’s new ecommerce platform, and upgrading Barclaycard PIN sentry devices across the NFU Mutual agency network. NFU Mutual is also leveraging Barclays’ financial markets capabilities to execute with the market at speed via electronic channels.
The end result will not put less digital-savvy customers at a disadvantage however. A blended channel approach will mean there will always be a balance available for customers to go online, phone an agent or head into an office to get a transaction done.
We take the time to listen to our customers, so we know that, at the moment, their first-choice channel is telephone, second choice is face to face and third-choice channel is email. However, ecommerce is growing, and we’ve got a demographic shift in our customer base over the next 10 years that will see farms being handed down to younger generations and we believe those younger generations will require more web enablement.
Group Chief Executive, NFU Mutual
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