The end of insurance as we know it: BNP Paribas Cardif

What makes your company truly innovative?

An entrepreneurial mindset has been key for BNP Paribas Cardif since day 1 and it is that asset which has enabled our company to grow internationally. Our B2B2C model pushes us to innovate for both our partners and our end-customers. Thus, innovation at BNP Paribas Cardif is an essential lever to accelerate our growth, adapt to new uses and further improve our products and services. BNP Paribas Cardif offers an open and inspiring work environment, encourages both internal innovation supporting intrapreneurs and external innovation by leveraging open innovation with startups. Thanks to this strong ambition we gather around 100 new projects every year during our Innovation awards process, on all kind of areas (not only regarding product improvement) aiming to transform the company for the better.

We are also putting data at the heart of our corporate strategy, as we aim to automate 80% of our processes in order to deliver quality, speed and efficiency for our partners, together with better service for our clients.

What are the major goals and results obtained from your ongoing innovation strategy? 

Each innovation initiative is chosen based on its high expected impact on customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, corporate social responsibility, company efficiency and its possibilities for reuse. Indeed, as a global company, one of our main goals is not solely innovating in one market but also to widely replicate an initiative if its first results were successful, to favor re-use.

Our main achievement is being very innovative, with around 100 new initiatives per year including 20% made in partnership with startups. It demonstrates BNP Paribas Cardif’s innovation mindset and appetite for open-innovation. Each year, a dozen initiatives are re-used in other markets.

The most important point is knowing that we are currently fostering the future growth engine of our company!

How is a culture of innovation achieved across your company?

Our mission is to accelerate BNP Paribas Cardif’s transformation. To do so, we organized our activities around three pillars: Explore, Make, Grow.

With Explore we help employees to anticipate the future, identify examples of new opportunities and conduct research and development work through co-creation and open innovation.

With Make we shape and build the innovations of tomorrow. We help countries and teams to define and carry on a proper go-to-market strategy to reach the product-market-fit or fail fast.

Finally, with Grow we share the innovation spirit and knowledge across the company thanks to trainings, webinars, initiatives promotion and reuse.

Thanks to this strategy, we cover all aspects of the innovation process from start to finish and help BNP Paribas Cardif employees to be fully involved actors in the company’s transformation.

How does your company manage the overall innovation process?

The “Explore” part of our strategy is based on the Cardif Lab experience center that helps employees and partners envision the future by living one day in 2025 and co-create the future of insurance by doing workshops.

The “Make” part of our strategy is based on proposing a range of tools, expertise and methodology (such as design sprint) to accelerate the go-to-market of our innovation.

The “Grow” part of our strategy is based on our partnership with General Assembly in order to train employees for future jobs but also on our Innovation Ambassadors program to enable employees to share their initiatives, favor reuse and highlight the most innovative ones.

In order to be a success, this strategy has to involve other teams such as:
- Strategy: to ensure the consistency with our strategic plan
- IT: to ensure scalability of our projects
- Legal: to ensure the consistency with the regulation
- HR: to involve all employees in this transformation
- Analytics: we need to rely on their high expertise to use data efficiently.

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