In “Is Pricing Innovation In Insurance a Zero Sum Game?”, consumers were more amenable to propositions based on evolving coverage types with dynamic pricing. Markets are pushing carriers to adopt pricing innovations. For many, the result is a zero-sum game, with improvements coming at the cost of reputational risks and increased regulatory oversight. But, those…
Read more
Five years ago, catastrophe(CAT) modelling was relatively unknown. Today, CAT modelling for hurricanes and earthquakes is fast becoming the norm in property underwriting, for catastrophes that can obliterate otherwise stable businesses. Commercially viable CAT models started emerging only in the last quarter century. Earlier, rudimentary methods were employed to estimate catastrophic losses as historical loss…
Read more
Digital ecosystems, orchestrated by powerful platform businesses and crisscrossing traditional industry sectors, are estimated to top 30% of global economic activity by 2025. While Amazon, Google, Alibaba, Tencent are early pioneers, others are shaping up across strata, in B2B as well as B2C. They thrive by efficiently matching supply with demand while solving deep entrenched…
Read more
The cryptocurrency industry has been on a roll, peaking at a market capitalization of $2.2 trillion this April. Motivated by its growing popularity, major corporate investors evinced an interest. Tesla acquired $1.5 billion of bitcoin (BTC) in January 2021 while MicroStrategy stockpiled $2.2 billion of BTC. Insurers slow to enter the crypto world, are warily…
Read more
In a historic 2012 ImageNet competition, a team led by Geoff Hinton debuted a new network architecture whose performance outshone all previous efforts at computer-based image recognition. With that, the era of deep learning was born, with computer vision as its original use case. Since then, computer vision capabilities have raced ahead. In layman terms,…
Read more
In the first half of 2021, European insurtech start-ups surpassed the 2020 total capital invested by more than a billion dollars, nearing $1.9 billion at end of May. The continent saw a few mega-deals, such as health insurer Alan’s €185 million Series D and fraud-detection software provider Shift Technology’s $220 million round. Other insurtechs to…
Read more
Back in 2007, when the concept of a pre-configured, fully integrated framework for transformation was largely unheard of, Infosys Technologies had launched Finacle Bank-in-a-Box (BIAB), a fully web-enabled application and process stack in a ready to deploy state for three regions – Europe, Middle East and South East Asia. Bank Sohar in Oman had successfully…
Read more
In previous parts of this series, increased usage of algorithmic underwriting in complex risks and prevalence of integrated workbenches in life insurance were discussed, as ways in which traditional underwriting was modernizing. In this final part, the use of third party, alternative data in auto insurance underwriting is the focus. A recent Deloitte study found,…
Read more
As the insurance industry adjusts to life in the 21st century (heh), an AI startup that has built computer vision tools to enable remote damage appraisals is announcing a significant round of growth funding. Tractable, which works with automotive insurance companies to let users take and submit photos of damaged cars that are then “read”…
Read more
In Part 1, underwriter workbenches were described as platforms to support underwriters in making complex decisions at speed and with confidence. Workbenches come equipped with relevant insights about clients and the risk being underwritten, along with a modern user interface to enable frictionless data flow. Historically, underwriting has been a nuanced aspect of insurance, seldom…
Read more