When I began my career as a journalist covering the insurance industry back in 1981, many of my early stories reported on dire warnings in a series of studies and expert pronouncements predicting the imminent demise of the independent agent, supposedly doomed to eventually go the way of the milk man and buggy whip makers.Executive SummaryDespite years of dire warnings predicting the imminent demise of the independent agent, Deloitte’s Sam Friedman believes these intermediaries are here to stay—as long as they continue to provide valuable advice and services to their customers.
Over the past 36 years, I’ve heard the same apocalyptic buzz from time to time about the precarious viability of insurance intermediaries, most recently premised on the notion that the proliferation of digitization, comparison quote sites, direct selling by insurers, artificial intelligence and a host of other technological innovations may pose an existential threat to agents.