Q4: Whether emerging risks or disruptive technologies. Where should insurers concentrate their attention right now?
A4: Insurers must recover quickly from the pandemic and market flux and uncertainties to spring back into health. The pandemic is testing the operational resilience of many business models, and their ability to respond quickly to customer demands. Right now, insurers need to deploy resilience strategies to support more advanced sales and distribution, pricing, claims and servicing operations too. It is for many a clear time for prioritization. Many insurers are assessing and selecting those emerging risks that need evaluating most to drive the right future impact, and that will yield the most interesting long-term growth opportunities.
Q5: What does this actually mean in terms of future technological requirements?
A5: Companies must improve their understanding of their risk portfolio on an individual and aggregated risk basis to mitigate upcoming risks. They must build highly detailed risk profiles to facilitate more flexible risk-based pricing for instance. This requires technology enablers. "Tech" is at the core of future transformations. Problems will be solved with better predictions through machine learning, advanced big data sources, and other sophisticated tech solutions that are coming to market.
Q6: Will emerging risks create a new generation of insurance models?
A6: It is likely. Dynamic economic shifts, pandemics, climate change, sudden poverty, changing consumer behavior are creating new risk types for which insurers have no expertise. For example, there is a need for a joint consortium like co-creation forums to tackle the climate change challenge. Insurers must determine a series of paths forward and help policyholders become more sustainable to minimize such types of risk long term. Another example, autonomous driving and intelligent systems drive new risk types too. The question is who is liable if a driver instructs an autonomous car to do something and causes an accident? Driver or Car Manufacturer? Counterparty exposures must be revisited. Many insurers already have a series of activities in place to determine how to assess risk and drive future efficiencies. Everyone has to keep up to date with emerging developments to design customer aligned products and services of the future. For gig economy and SME workers, new technologies enable flexibility in the way we as individuals manage work and life. Adaptive insurance models must and will continue to come to market Insurtech.
Q7: You shared with us earlier that we must pay attention to Cyber risk. Could you elaborate a little bit more about your viewpoint on the topic?
A7: With COVID-19 and homeworking, we will start to see new cybercrimes (e.g. home networks and personal devices). Coverage gaps will increase for individuals and businesses as the usage of tech evolves and more sensitive digitally kept records appear. Insurers must gain a better view of their total aggregated risk exposures. Some insurers have in-house dedicated cybercrime detection engineers which look at weak points and ensure that customers’ systems are kept secure. Risk profiling, footprint, and prevention. As we all know, Covid-19 creates new types of commercial liability. New opportunities will emerge to evolve underwriting techniques and welcome more sophisticated modelling approaches. InsurTechs cannot yet solve the problem end-to-end as it takes time to do so.