Monday, October 3rd, 2022

Additions to the portfolio: insurance brokers and product margins

Pie chart showing turnover and margin for products with a dark background

Occasionally I revisit old projects to apply new learnings, or see if there’s something old to resurface. Two projects popped up, one with an Insurance Broker trying to solve problems in their B2B offering, the other a financial report for a business struggling to make a reasonable margin.

The Insurance Broker

TL;DR an Insurance Broker was losing money on its commercial lines (B2B) book. This was a bit unusual as the B2B side has higher premiums and commissions. I took a deep dive, looked at various bits of data, ran a couple of customer surveys and so on.

(Note: I randomised the data to preserve client confidentiality)

Reworked renewal performance

The original report included a couple of bar charts showing what type of renewals took place over the year, and the income. I merged the two into one so on the left side you can see the volume of business, on the right the value. Overlaid onto this is whether the renewals are in the small business team, and the commissions and fees.

Bar chart showing the volume and value of commercial lines business for an insurance broker

Infographic

One of the “innovations” I employed on this project was an infographic to summarise my initial findings. This was circulated by email with the full report, and was well received as being concise and easy to understand. It’s a technique I’ve employed a few times since.

The original design used the client’s branding.

Infographic showing various aspects of an insurance broker's renewal performance

Turnover and margin by product category

This is an exploration to combine two charts from a report for a retailer I worked with. They were struggling with underperformance in a couple of product lines, but couldn’t work out why.

The original report separated turnover and margin. I wanted to bring them together, as well as experiment with creating dark and light versions quickly.

This design uses a donut to show the proportion of income attributed to each product category, and a bar chart approach for the margin. Extended bars indicate a positive margin (profit), depressed bars show a negative margin (loss).

Pie chart showing turnover and margin for products with a dark background

The dark mode version was created first, using a color scheme lifted from the client’s brand. My vision is this would be used on an online version of the company accounts or a pitch to investors.

The light mode version flipped some of the colors to maintain consistency with brand. This would be useful on a printed or downloaded report where white paper is likely to be used.

Pie chart showing turnover and margin for products with a dark background

Don’t forget you can see more of my work in my portfolio.

My name is Ross Hori

I'm a freelance writer, designer and photographer. By day I create articles, features and reports. At night I take photos and write fiction. Find out more.