Good riposte to critics complaining insurers slow to innovate by Matteo Carbone. Innovation is rarely as fast as people think even though speed of change increases all the time.
Unlike new insurtechs like Lemonade, Slice and TROV with single product offerings and limited geographical coverage, carriers and brokers offer multiple product lines and often across many geographies.
Vendors generally over-hype the benefits and under-estimate the time and cost involved to plan, trial and deploy insurance systems. In some ways insurance technology today is like BI & Analytics software 5 years ago when Cognos, Hyperion, and Business Objects amongst others were the standard solution.
With the incumbent software vendors you can "Do anything you like as long as you've got big pockets, loads of time and can put up with an army of developers and consultants to make it work".
Then along came Qlik, Tableau, Logi Analytics, Sisense and many others that delivered the same functionality, and more, at a lower cost and much faster. Importantly they added self-service BI so business users across the enterprise as well as analysts could benefit from better decision-making based on actionable insights.
Similarly insurtechs today are challenging the incumbent leaders and offering more for less with faster deployment. It still takes time in the same way that BI and Analytics deployments are still struggling to meet the expectations of users but are getting there.
Read Matteo's description of telematics and how it has achieved maturity in the Italian Auto Insurance market but is immature in the UK and US- and the reasons why. Then extend that to combining the connectivity potential of sensors & IoT (Internet of Things), data and analytics and User-based-Insurance (UBI).
One thing that has held back the full exploitation of IoT & UBI is not just video recordings but "Live Video" recordings which can be analysed in virtual real-time i.e. with a minimal time lag of 5 seconds in addition to longer periods. Any insurance platform MUST deliver that capability. It is not enough to analyse just photos and historic video.
Then insurers can offer immediate assistance in the case of road traffic accidents at home and abroad: -
- triage medical and emergency services help
- replacement hire vehicles and accommodation
- vehicle repatriation
- Live translation services
- immediately initiate the claims process without having to ask unnecessary questions as the data is already available to start FNOL and the next stage.
Carriers are already addressing this as Matteo Carbone shows and you can see that it involves far more than just technology. It is the connectivity in vehicles themselves, the Global Assistance Call Centres, the availability of additional translators when those in the call centres are maxed out, the orchestration of all the participants in such events from claimants and passengers to insurers internal staff to supply chain to claimant again.
That is far more complex than a simple insurtech product and takes time to perfect and improve.
It is not just a digital claims platform; it is also a communications and orchestration hub that looks after claimants and every participant to a successful outcome for customers/claimants from beginning to end.
It is happening faster than you think so read through Matteo's article through the link below and let us all know your thoughts.
I’d like to focus on two main points: 1. The ability of the insurance sector to innovate is incredibly higher than the image commonly perceived. 2. While not all InsurTech innovations will work, a few of them will change the insurance sector as we know it. Consider, for example, the trajectory of digital insurance distribution. The German Post Office first experimented with remote insurance sales at the beginning of the 1980s in Berlin and Düsseldorf using Bildschirmtext (data transmitted through the telephone network and the content displayed on a television set). Coming back to our time, almost 60 percent of auto insurance coverage is sold online in the UK insurance market and comparison websites are the “normal” way to purchase an auto insurance policy. In few other sectors is one able to see a comparable penetration of the digital distribution.
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