This post is from Sujoy Chakravarty online marketing manager of Alfred Insurance in Dubai. He decided to drop by the GROW Blog and give insight and perspective to the insurance industry in Dubai.

We’re very happy to write our perspective for The Grow Program.

Though we’re miles apart geographically, it strikes us as very interesting that the subjects spoken about are of much interest to us and the challenges of making insurance a part of the social media revolution is as much a challenge in the most advanced economies in the world as it is in ours.

So, who are we?

We’re a medium sized insurance broking firm based in Dubai. We were setup in1995 and in 2010 we launched our online platform for consumer insurance, mainly car insurance, by the name of insurancemarket.ae – the idea being that this is a market or supermarket for insurance where you can choose the right policy for you. But, beyond that, we also give the consumer a ‘personal shopper’ who helps you choose.

Several members of the insurance industry, from underwriting to management, here in the UAE are from the UK.

The UK is one of the foremost markets where the phenomenon of aggregation took over about a decade ago and changed the insurance distribution landscape completely. Price comparison websites have now become the main way of purchasing insurance in the UK – this is not the case in Dubai.

Here, the population is transient.

The majority of the residents are expatriates (around 90%) who work here on a residential visa.

As a result, when buying insurance, they have traditionally sought to speak with a human adviser that they trust through a reference from family or friends.

Having said this, with the influx of Western expatriates there is an awareness of the price comparison phenomenon. Having said that, due to the overall infancy of the ecommerce environment and an overall feeling that online abilities are lacking, the human advisor is still a very important aspect of building credibility with a buyer.

Moreover, since insurance is intangible, it will be one of the last things that will be bought online – first, the tangible products would have to start selling online successfully.

On the other hand, it is worth noting that price comparison websites have globally become very powerful through the use of large scale mass media advertising. With billions of pounds being spent on such services in the UK, if the model is to succeed in a place like the UAE one would assume that the same kind of budgets would have to be invested by companies. ‘

However, since the population is just over a few million and since it is transient overall, brand building costs may become prohibitive to running such a price comparison model successfully.

Similarly, for the same reasons it would also be difficult for the insurance companies, over 60 of them, to establish the brand equity like that of the large American auto insurance companies like Geico and All State.

The final challenge to achieving successful insurance aggregation in the UAE would be the process of gaining the support of the key motor insurance companies to link to their pricing systems and generate quotes for comparison purposes – which again would be near impossible without a serious advertising that looks to achieve genuinely large market share.

It is for these reasons above, and for an overall commitment to making sure insurance is bought prudently, we at insurancemarket.ae will continue employing our dedicated personal shoppers (insurance advisors) to help our clients choose their policies from the comparison table which is built manually by a competent administration unit.

With the availability of great people and manageable costs in this respect, we don’t see why any other model is necessary for the economy in the short to medium term – even though the natural thought from an initial perspective would be to automate and sell online.

We look forward to your feedback.

Sujoy Chakravarty