Insurtech in 2017: making insurance great again • World of Banking

Insurtech in 2017: making insurance great again

Make insurance great again!

There are many reasons to be excited about insurtech in 2017, believes Oisin Merrins, editor at FinTech Futures Series (Banking Technology’s sister company).

In these tumultuous times, the relative calm of the insurance industry may give the impression that all is ticking along as usual. That impression would be wrong.

2017 looks set to be another exciting year as InsurTech continues its mission to “make insurance great again”. The digital and business strategies of insurers are in closer alignment and insurtech companies continue to accelerate the industry’s transformation, connecting the old and new worlds. Partnerships between the big and small continue to multiply and the benefits of these symbiotic relationships begin to be felt, with some insurers on the road to cultural change and some insurtechs on the route to scale.

We take a look at some of the trends that will affect the industry over the coming months.

Insurtech will put customer engagement front and centre

While digitisation, spurred on by the growth of insurtech, can deliver efficiencies in how insurers operate, it can also pave the way for a renewed emphasis on engaging the customer. Those insurers that get it right will put customer-centricity, customer experience, and value-added services at the core of what they do, harnessing the potential of insurtech solutions that provide frictionless, seamless experiences across areas such as claims and policy management.

It will only be through innovation guided by the principles of customer engagement that progress will be made in tackling those famously low levels of trust and satisfaction that plague the industry.

Insurtechs look to kickstart IoT with advanced analytics

There has been plenty of talk in recent years of how the Internet of Things (IoT) will fundamentally transform the insurance industry as a whole. But the “data-driven insurer” of the future, using rich and real-time information to meet evolving customer needs and stay ahead of the competition, has yet to materialise.

The reason for this is pretty simple: burdened by legacy, insurers have not risen to the challenge of recording and analysing the enormous quantities of structured and unstructured data to derive reliable, actionable insights.

However, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) can provide carriers with more advanced processing capabilities and analytical tools. Insurers serious about realising the IoT’s potential can look to the many insurtechs offering new ways of exploiting data through the use of AI.

Silencing the sceptics – blockchain begins to deliver

As in fintech, insurtech has seen the arrival of many single point solutions that chip away at the incumbents’ value chain. Yet as a platform for digitisation itself, distributed ledger technology (DLT) can in fact be leveraged to innovate across all functions of the industry.

Insurers are evidently beginning to take DLT seriously, encouraged by its potential use in claims automation, and we can expect some tangible developments on this front over the com

via worldofbanking.org