Google UK’s industry director for finance, Ian Morgan, has urged life insurers and pensions providers to make their products more ‘mobile friendly’ and enable the industry to interact more effectively with consumers.

Speaking at an insurance conference In London on 3 March, which was organised by the Economist, Life Insurance International asked Morgan and an industry panel why life insurers have yet to embrace mobile financial services as effectively as other retail and business sectors.

Morgan said: "There is a legacy issue in life and pensions with providers often having old systems so to put a mobile front end in can be expensive."

He said: "Quite a lot of products cannot be bought or serviced without the telephone. The vast majority of organisations are just not set up [to use mobile]. But if they do, they will have a far better interaction with their customers."

Chris Lamberton, partner, head of EMEIA financial services customer analytics, at Ernst & Young, told delegates at the conference: "The Far East and Africa and the BRICs nations have leapfrogged to mobile [for insurance], and we can learn a lot from them in terms of developing propositions that suit themselves to mobile and also really slick mobile experiences as well."

"This because if a product can be designed that works very effectively on a mobile device, it will work really well on any other distribution mechanism too," said Lamberton.

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Lamberton added: "I think we can learn a lot from overseas markets in terms of mobile [insurance] product propositions and the mobile customer experience."