On Thursday, October 12th, more than 200 insurance experts met at Novotel Kirchberg to discuss innovation and investments in the insurance sector. This second edition of Insurtech Summit organized by InFinance brought together local and international professionals through conferences, workshops sessions, and ended with the traditional networking cocktail allowing experts to further discuss the topic.
The event started with Minh Q. Tran, former General Partner, AXA Strategic Ventures and founder of Capital Insurtech, who made an analysis of investment in the field of insurtech and the challenges it now implies. Specifying that “the insurance industry was rather defensive” at the beginning, Mr Tran asserted that “insurtech will evolve towards prevention strategies because insurers do not want to be payers any more”. A change of status which will develop the co-operation between insurance companies and many startups specialized in insurtech. In this respect, Mr Tran created Capital Insurtech, a venture capital working as well on the insight, i.e on the level of actual trends, as on the foresight, i.e. what in a few years will impact the insurance field.
Digital at the very heart of the insurance transformation
The intervention of Gerrit Denayer, Innovation & Solution Manager at Business & Decision, focused on innovation with the example of the Undercover chatbot created by his company. The challenges concerning chatbot are multiple and must be encircled between different items. Indeed, the use of a chatbot by a customer can possibly be as well an information request or a research for a contractual transaction as a monologue or an interactive conversation with the chatbot. Thus, these four defined themes imply the integration of various specific technologies in each insurance specificities, in order to cover all the possible scenarios. Yet, automation does not replace human intervention though, as Mr Denayer said: “if the customer is not satisfied and lets it know at the end of the interaction with the chatbot, his request is transferred to an agent to develop the interaction by e-mail”.
Risks and opportunities related to insurtech
The afternoon went on with a round table about digital transformation and the return on investment, moderated by Geoffroy Gailly, Partner, KPMG, with the participation of Jean Elia, CEO, Sogelife, Marc Stevens, CEO, OneLife and Régis Mahieux, Deputy CEO, CALI Europe. All agreed on the difficulty to measure the ROI and Mr. Elia added: “taking the chance of making nothing is much riskier than taking the chance of making something with a bad return on investment”. Marc Stevens explained, when it comes to digital transformation, that it was necessary to have “an interchangeability between the digital approach and the human approach”, although there are new completely-digital habits today, and to make sure the customer experience was more user-friendly. And when Regis Mahieux was asked if the customer experience implies a 100% digital approach, he asserted that “the philosophy to adopt is not based on all or nothing. The only priority is to facilitate the life of the customer”. He added that a 100% digital approach was not viable, because one must not forget that “there are men behind each machine”.
via www.infinance.lu