How to make the InsurTech Revolution actually happen (15 September 2022)

A Future of Finance webinar with insurance companies, technology companies and regulators

Thursday September 15 at 2pm UK time

According to Willis Re, there are around 3,000 self-proclaimed InsurTechs at work in the world today. The age and size and funding and technologies of InsurTechs is so various, and the range of activities they pursue so immense, that it is difficult to comprehend which innovations are working and which are not. The use of video and telemetrics, such as the admission of photographic evidence and sensors in motor insurance, attract headlines. But the sales and the funding tend to go to larger and more established firms, including more or less conventional insurance companies and software as a service (SaaS) vendors engaged not in reinventing the industry but in grinding down the expense ratios of the incumbents. Most InsurTechs have lowered the expectations they set at the height of the blockchain boom of 2015-18 and now seek partnerships with or acquisitions by the incumbents. Blockchain-in-insurance persists, but largely in collectivised or infrastructural forms, and as private or permissioned rather than public networks. It is artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, capable of extracting information from growing repositories of digital data and learning from it, that are now seen as the crucial innovation in an industry which has relied since its inception on the quality of the data it can obtain. But even in the (ostensibly, no-brainer) case of data, the insurance industry seems stuck between the narrow focus of InsurTech specialists and the daunting and ever-increasing immensity of the data available. What is required to break the stasis is a fundamental re-conceptualisation of the industry to alter the incentives of both the insurers and the insured. At the moment, insurers assess risks not as problems to be managed but as financial opportunities. Policyholders, on the other hand, treat insurance as a less-than-honest product and an invariably negative customer experience. For them, it inhabits a twilight zone that lies somewhere between a necessary evil and an occasion for fraud. A true and durable InsurTech revolution would reverse the polarity of this negative dialectic. It would use data to understand the real needs of customers, as opposed to the cover which people are obliged to purchase for contractual or governmental reasons. The industry would then put a price on covering in their entirety the probability and impact of the risks that customers ought to cover – and then invite those customers to pay the premiums for a superior product. This Future of Finance webinar will review the impact of InsurTech on the insurance industry and ask whether the industry needs to re-think the fundamental principles by which it operates before it can be transformed by new techniques and technologies.

Among the topics to be discussed at this webinar are:

What are the most urgent priorities in the insurance industry?
Where in the insurance markets are InsurTechs making the biggest impact?
Which technologies are proving most successful in changing the insurance industry?
Why has blockchain struggled to make an impact in insurance?
Why is artificial intelligence (AI) seen as such a powerful tool in insurance?
What sorts of InsurTechs are investors backing?
Why is it so hard for InsurTechs to scale their businesses?
What distinguishes an InsurTech unicorn?
Why is operational inefficiency in the insurance industry so hard to eradicate?
Why is the level of fraud in insurance so high?
What does improved customer service mean in practice?
Is “customer engagement” working?
What impact would ownership by consumers of their own data have on the insurance industry?
Personalisation is seen as crucial to customer attraction and retention, but is that true of bad risks as well as good ones?
Do telemetrics help the insurer more than the insured?
Are insurance “marketplaces” potentially transformative or a niche activity?
Are InsurTechs ambitious enough?
Does the insurance industry need to re-think its modus operandi from first principles before it can be transformed?

Panellists

Meredith Barnes-Cook, Global Head of Insurance & Industries at Ushur

Meredith brings over 30 years of leadership experience to transforming how insurance companies interact with their customers, agents, brokers, members, and claimants. Previously, she has served as an industry consultant providing strategic guidance to carriers and providers as well as as an executive at Liberty Mutual where she led countless digital and organization transformations across Claims, Policy, Underwriting, Risk Control and Contact Centres.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredithbarnes-cook/

Andrew Bennet, Global Insurance Director and CEO UK at Greater Than

Andrew Bennett has over 30 years of leadership experience in Personal Lines Insurance and Insurtech, working for Allianz, Direct Line, BGL Group, Insurethebox as well as two Insurtech startups. During his career, Andrew has pioneered the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for the better understanding of mobile risk, fraud and crash detection, operational processes, and new usage-based insurance pricing models.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewbennettinsurance/

Ed Gaze, CEO and co-founder, Innovative Risk Labs

Ed is CEO and co-founder of IRL, which is building a network of insurtech start-ups, providing them with FCA Appointed Representative status, and helping them grow.

Prior to this Ed headed up the Lloyd’s Lab, the home of InsurTech and innovation at Lloyd’s of London. Ed was there from its launch in 2018 through to the completion of its eighth cohort in July 2022. Beyond running the flagship Lab programme, his role was to break down barriers to innovation and to help create the insurance market of the future. Key to his role was finding leading insurtechs from around the world, facilitating partnerships, and creating a culture of innovation in the market.

His first step into the world of financial services, in the Lloyd’s Lab, followed a decade at KPMG and EY, where he was a consultant specialising in data, analytics, and tech. Prior to that he was a design and manufacturing engineer in the defence industry.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardgaze/

Craig John, Global Innovation Director, Davies Group

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cb8-craig-john/

Moderated by Dominic Hobson, Co-Founder at Future of Finance

Dominic Hobson has worked for himself for 30 years. He was one of the founders of Asset International, a transatlantic financial publishing, events and survey business, which was sold in 2009.

Since then, Dominic has contributed to the work of two data businesses covering financial markets, run a peer group network for hedge fund managers, and co-founded the Future of Finance, which hosts events on innovation in finance.

As one half of Hobson Cardew, Dominic also provides consultancy services to a number of financial services businesses and market infrastructures.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominic-hobson-49b8222/

For more information please contact Wendy Gallagher on wendy.gallagher@futureoffinance.biz