Disclosing functional value of customer ownership: analysis of mutual insurers’ annual reports

Owner value in customer-owned mutual insurance companies is best defined as benefits and value created for customer-owners as consumers of the insurance services. Compared to investor-owned insurers’ (IOIs) task to maximise profit for invested capital, customer ownership leads to fundamentally different starting point for the managers to organise operations. However, while earlier literature offers a good basis to understand customer ownership on a strategic level, knowledge on the value creation processes in practice remains limited. To begin filling this research gap, the aim of the article is to identify how managers of mutual insurers communicate the functional value of ownership to their customer-owners. We analysed a dataset of annual reports of 18 distinct mutuals, from Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA. The process produced an intellectual framework illustrating how mutuals disclose the functional value of ownership to their customer-owners.