Round table of January 12 of the Women in Tech evening
Since a few years, the insurance industry has to face three main challenges :
- To manage regulatory evolutions, with the most recent regulatory constraints being IDD (Insurance distribution directive) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), which both have high impact on insurers. In the same time, the space to innovate decreases year after year; the legislator dictating what you must sell, to whom and can even control either prices and/or margins.
- To face a very competitive environment with the historical success of few banks on the insurance market and more recently the arrival of pure-players that come with a disruptive offer (Allan, Oscar …).
- To offer the client an experience comparable with the one he experiments in other industries (ex.: when he orders on Amazon websites).
To face all these challenges, new technologies and digital transformation could have been identified earlier as key success factors, but it has not been immediately « crystal clear » for insurers. In fact, at the other end, the insurance industry is a work-force industry (technical functions, distribution, claims and contracts management) that has been threatened by impacts of automatization, digitalization, IA, …
At the end, we could say that, historically, insurance companies have opposed innovation & human.
Things are definitively different today and due to the pressure of customers and news competitors, insurance companies deploy customer-oriented strategies and tend to be more and more technology saavy.
Main actors have an absolute faith that :
- Automatization of low added value operations allows to dedicate more relevant time to the end user either for insurance distribution or claim and contract management;
- New technologies contribute to provide more « customer centric » offers and to disrupt the full value chain; start up value proposition, often integrated in insurance products illustrate this major evolution
- Artificial intelligence (Home serve, Insurify)
- Big data (Dream Quart, Zen we share)
- Blockchain (Fizzy: automatic compensation in case of flights delay)
- IOT (Roost / Fitsense: smart product, content & price)
- Collaborative platforms (Friends insurance, Inspeer)
- Others, as drones to contribute to simplify risk analysis and claim management (Better View)
- At the end of the day, insurance products better fit customers usage and among those :
- Offers dedicated offers to specific communities (wecover);
- Customized products based on the usage;
- Rewards to encourage virtuous circles (Marmelade);
- Better offer segmentation (Wilow);
- “On / Off” insurance contracts that allow to be covered only when you need to be (Trov);
- Insurance as a commodity (Blablacar);
- Co-shopping (Bought by many)
- Disintermediation (Umavo: investors and insurees)
To conclude, we could say that innovation will contribute to make the insurance more human.
Marie-Sophie Houis-Valletoux
PMP partner in charge of insurance, banking and health
