If you have every bought motor insurance online then I may be to blame! As selling moved online I lead a team looking at the sale of insurance.

We didn’t start with motor insurance we started with shop insurance as that was an easier process. Shops have been insured for 100s of years and Lloyd’s underwriters had a widely used eight page standard questionnaire. Every time there was a war or some natural disaster extra questions were added, but never removed. We developed that questionnaire on-line, and it took over 40 minutes to complete.

Recognizing a new approach was needed the underwriters were asked which answers they actually used to set their price. That was easy – there were six of them. So we only asked those six questions, got the price and any extra information needed was collected after the sale. Within six months all the surplus question had gone.

This is the transformational power of moving to the digital world. Why do I tell this story? Over the last three weeks our collective lives have moved further on line then they had in the previous ten years – and the government have just extended the lock down for another three weeks.

When life returns to ‘normal’ it will be nothing like the normal we knew in February