Merlin Beyts, Head of Content for ITC DIA Europe, asks if 2023 is the year for insurance businesses to accelerate or consolidate Let’s begin with a question. Has digital insurance hit a tipping point? There are many reasons to suggest that 2023 will be, if nothing else, a fascinating year for both insurtechs and incumbents alike. Having seen insurers adopt technology at a rate we’d never dreamed of, we have now entered into a tumultuous year, fraught with uncertainty. Natural catastrophes are on the rise, workforce shortages remain a serious issue and insurtech investment has slowed, with far ..read more

Dan Woods, Founder and CEO, Socotra, sets out the key steps for launching a successful insurance product Around the world, the insurance industry faces myriad challenges, ranging from a rapidly evolving technology landscape, to minimising product maintenance costs, to adapting to consumer behaviours and preferences, shaped by today’s digital-first world. Against these growing headwinds, it’s more important than ever that insurers remain competitive and innovate at speed. The majority clearly agree. In a KPMG study that interviewed 1,325 chief executives across 11 major sectors, including insur ..read more

Ben Rose, Co-founder and President of the reinsurance platform Supercede, looks back over a tough year and considers how better insight into timely data could address reinsurer concerns going forward Long before Hurricane Ian reared its ugly head, my colleague Jerad Leigh, Supercede’s CEO, wrote a timely piece outlining three lessons for cedents looking to get the best results from their reinsurance placements, including how technology can help.Have those lessons changed, following one of the hardest January 1st renewal seasons in recent memory? With the earth moving beneath their feet, what d ..read more

Payments provider Vitesse is helping a new wave of parametric insurers deliver funds where they’re needed, when they’re needed – often in a matter of hours. Co-founder and CEO Phil McGriskin explains the dramatic impact that can have “The stock is destroyed, we’ve lost everything. We don’t have insurance; we were refused after the floods in 2012. It would cost us £10,000 a year plus £20,000 for excess.” That’s a quote from a distraught small business owner whose comic book shop in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, was inundated by the Boxing Day floods that devastated northern England in 2015. Fo ..read more

What’s the business landscape like in the US for intrepid insurtechs heading West? The US has the largest proportion (56.1 per cent) of the global insurance market, far exceeding densely populated Japan (7.4 per cent) and the UK (7.3 per cent), making it a honeypot for providers and their investors. Duck Creek Technologies from Chicago and Ethos Life from Texas are among the biggest success stories, having racked up mega-rounds in the last year, shooting their valuations to unicorn status. Fellow unicorn, Palo Alto-based Next Insurance, can boast the backing of industry giant Munich Re, which ..read more

Employment-based insurance is the most common private health coverage in the United States. And it’s where tech is proving key to bringing down premiums and improving benefits In the US, healthcare is a divisive issue. From COVID-19 to the recent Roe v Wade ruling, which overturned universal access to abortion, those who can least afford medical assistance – often those who most need it – are priced out. For the majority of people in the States who have it, their healthcare provision is tied to their occupation. Any accident, injury, or illness which could result in time off, is usually covere ..read more

With still so much uncertainty surrounding the trade in voluntary carbon credits, Natalia Dorfman, Co-founder and CEO of startup Kita, believes insurance could be key to reaching net zero Since the Paris Agreement in 2015, 192 countries and the European Union have signed up to the fight against climate change – aiming to reduce carbon emissions and limit the global temperature increase to below two degrees Celsius this century. In effect, that means the world must reach net zero emissions by 2050. And yet, 2021 saw the amount of CO2 emissions rise to an historic high of 36.3 billion tonnes – a ..read more

Zego, the UK’s first insurtech unicorn, took the road less travelled when it started offering usage-based vehicle insurance to gig workers. The market’s getting busier, but it’s still out in front – and plans to stay there, says COO Sonia Flynn In his futurist envisioning of the year 2040, CEO of insurer Zego, Stan Saar, laid out how the choices we make to get from A to B will affect the world we will live in. From autonomous single-person electric vehicles to self-driving vans with no human operators that deliver everything from our Amazon order to our lunch, movement will become more efficie ..read more

Could embedded insurance help address the exceptionally low rate of pet protection in the UK? Shreyas Vasanthkumar, Managing Director EMEA at Duck Creek Technologies, explores the potential A recent survey by Duck Creek Technologies of pet insurance buyers in the UK, about their feelings on pet insurance pricing, availability, products and service offering, showed a market under-delivering for its policyholders and their pets. None of the pet insurance buyers we spoke to said that they were completely happy with the coverage they could get at a price point they could afford, leaving many to pu ..read more

Here are more insurtech solutions available than ever before, but if you’ve scaled to the point at which they become useful, how do you choose? James Elliott, MGA Lead at Instanda, offers some timely advice If you’re an MGA that has been putting off the ‘technology conversation’, then chances are you’ve reached a tipping point –the point at which a series of small changes or incidents becomes significant enough to cause a larger, more important change.From an MGA’s perspective, it’s when you realise that, to grow your business further, you need to adopt a more comprehensive technology solution ..read more