New insurance technologies and innovations – no matter how much they increase connectivity and collaboration between insurance professionals – will never quite compare to the combination of two local minds with shared experience, working together to solve a local insurance problem.

Read next: Why do insurers overcomplicate their language?

Let me explain what I mean. If you weren’t already aware, Insurance Business publishes in six countries or regions worldwide: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Asia-Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand. As part of that, our editors are interviewing insurance professionals from coast-to-coast and border-to-border.

The geographic spread is immense. Canada, for example, has a total area of ​​9,879,750 km², according to worldpopulationreview.com, trumping the US (9,831,510 km²) and Australia (7,741,220 km²). Meanwhile, Asia is the world’s largest and most populous continent.

The thing about risk is that no two risks are the same. While a small business risk in Eastern Canada might look the same on paper, or in automated computer algorithm, as a small business risk 6,000km away in Western Canada, there are local nuances that must be considered when underwriting that risk. The same goes for any other country or region where Insurance Business has a publication.

Brokers have benefitted hugely from greater connectivity in the insurance industry. There’s no doubt about that. If they have relationships with international insurers, they’re now able to tap into intellectual capital from insurance professionals and risk experts around the world – a boon inaccessible in the not-so-distant past.

But even the best and brightest brains cannot understand the culture or the “feel” of a place and its people if they’ve never been there or experienced it first-hand. That’s not something you can enter into a database and run through an automated risk assessment and underwriting tool. It comes from