Insurtech Story Podcast Insurtech Story

The auto Insurance industry participates in various processes that are characterized by data exchange, which is modified or updated by many parties. Hence, the auto insurance industry can benefit from the adoption of blockchain technology. However, there is a lack of understanding of the technology, the legal implications and the issues in implementing the technology. The session today aims at finding potential opportunities for the auto insurance sector on the implementation of blockchain technology. It also discusses issues and concerns for automakers wanting to adopt blockchain technologies with real life examples and solutions from KoineArth.

Key discussion areas:

1. Being in the blockchain field for years now and your recent entry in the auto insurance domain, how you think car insurance companies can best benefit through blockchain specially in a time when regulatory norms are defining the future of insurance.

2. In India, we have seen how IRDAI have recently announced the usage-based insurance model approval and your organization has a significant contribution in this regard. Can you explain, how your blockchain led solutions aim to monetize data and help reduce cost for the end user.

3. Lastly, you broadly spoke about enterprise NFT’s and how it can solve auto insurance problems in various media for the end customer. Can you explain how this benefits insurtech players and insurance players specially from the context of data sharing.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Praphul Chandra, who is the Founder of  KoineArth which is a blockchain company that offers supply chain solutions for invoice financing, contract enforcement, and inventory visibility. With over 2 decades of experience in the software industry, Dr. Praphul worked with Hewlett Packard for 10 years and held various positions such as Senior Research Scientist, Research Manager and Principal Research Scientist. He also worked as a Software Engineer at Tachion Networks, USA, as a Design Engineer at Texas Instruments, USA and as a Software Developer at Infosys. In July 2017, he started Koinearth to explore how the emerging technology of blockchains can leverage Game Theory and be combined with AI/ML to provide solutions to some of today's challenges. In 2015, Dr. Praphul was featured as one of “The Top 10 Data Scientists” in India.

Data today is the most valued asset and it is the most dispersed across several platforms specially in life insurance that has been sitting on a rich trove of big data which is mostly untapped. Artificial intelligence-based data management technologies for the life insurance industry are being used much more quickly now. Particularly, artificial intelligence in life insurance has grown in prominence within the areas of risk assessment, fraud detection, and efficient underwriting. Besides, the advantages of AI/ML applications in life insurance, particularly natural language processing, has started to get greatly appreciated by businesses. It became simpler to calculate the exposure within insurance portfolios for unforeseen events by being able to standardise previously unstructured documents.

Points of discussion

1. The global AI market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 42.2% to $733.7 billion by 2027 and AIML use in life insurance is only bound to grow. Based on current trends, how you think AIML can fast track its adoption within the life insurance industry.

2. In the insurance industry, data and analytics are crucial to the underwriting process. Underwriting is a crucial step not just in life but in other areas of the insurance process since it involves risk analysis and pricing. Considering this, what would be your take on some of the industry best practices for AI in life insurance underwriting.

3. Artivatic is known for its AI integration support in the Indian insurance market and you guys have showcased some great products for the sector like AUSIS for the life insurance underwriting. Can you please brief our listeners a bit more on this and how it aims to transform the life insurance business.

Speaker Bio: S. Mahesh, who is the Vice President – Products at Artivatic.ai which is a global risk & decision-making platform that automates human decisions in insurance & healthcare to provide efficiency, transparency, risk assessment, personalisation and digitisation in the entire lifecycle of operations. In his role with Artivatic.ai, he is responsible for ongoing development of smart technology driven underwriting platform embedded with AI / ML based risk management models and rule engines.

Mahesh is a senior leader with over 29 years of experience in the BFSI sector specifically with the Life Insurance sector in areas of Operations, Technology and Administration. In his past experience, Mahesh has worked in senior leadership positions with companies such as Future Generali Life, Tata AIA Life and HDFC Bank.  He is a domain expert in life insurance and his expertise is in running large scale operations and implementing cutting edge customer-centric solutions and processes. 

Key discussion areas:


How you think the future of technology will shape the benefits industry?
Moving to some specifics, the employee benefits industry is changing with varied scope of offerings. The World Health Organization suggested that by 2030 depression will be the world’s most widespread disease. So it is clear that there will no “one size fits all” theory, flexibility will be the key. So how do you see technology supporting this to benefit both insured and the insurer / employer?
To look at the digital side, there is a rising focus on digital tools. However as per a study by EY, 28% of middlemen like brokers are less satisfied with tools offered by insurance companies. What’s your experience in this and how you see the future changing?
According to you, what will influence the future of benefits design?

Speaker Bio: Michael Levin, is the Co-founder and CEO of Vericred, a company that connects InsurTech companies and insurance carriers through a suite of APIs that transform the speed, reliability and efficiency of delivering health insurance and employee benefits to consumers everywhere.

Based in New York and backed by leading investors, Vericred offers robust solutions for the employer market, as well as the under 65 individual, Medicaid and Medicare markets. Levin identified the problem that Vericred was founded to solve while he served as Chief Operating Officer for Affiliates Risk Management Services (ARMS), an insurance, risk management and e-learning services provider for healthcare professionals. Prior to ARMS, Levin disrupted the color printer supply business with the first company he founded, Media Sciences. After a decade of growing the company to a peak NASDAQ market cap of $80 million the company was split in two and sold to Xerox and Katun. Levin received his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (BSME) degree from Lehigh University. He and his wife Nancy have four sons and live in New Jersey.

Like many sectors of the economy, the insurance industry is affected by increasing technological innovation and disruption in the digital era. Technology in insurance, or Insurtech, is experiencing rapid growth, increasing investment and enabling technology to greater influence, and in some cases transform, the insurance industry.

Now moving the shift a bit to APAC, this region is particularly experiencing massive technological advancement in the insurance industry. The extremely high expectations of consumers in the region for seamless and personalized digital experiences inspire a great deal of innovation. Firms in mainland China and other markets are experimenting widely and delivering impressive results with new products, new distribution models, and new technology. The top performers are both capitalizing on near-term opportunities and establishing a strong foundation for long-term success. The performance is primarily driven by China and some positive performance in South Korea. However, some mature market in the region such as Japan is struggling due to their rising population age and consumer expectation shift. The penetration rate in China increased from 1.4% in 2013 to 1.9% in 2018. Non-life insurance is showing rapid growth compared to life insurance in the Asia-Pacific region. The Gross Written Premium (GWP) for life insurance increased by CAGR 4% whereas, the non-life insurance for the Asia-pacific region increased by 7.5% for the same period.

With this, we moved on to discuss the following:

1. Views on opportunities of Insurtech in the insurance industry.

2. Insurtech is a steadily growing sector within the larger tech, start-up and fintech spheres when Covid-19 made landfall, catalysed cross-industrial digitisation and accelerated the boom. This growth has been marked by the rise of many insurtech giants with some crossing a valuations above $1 billions. Basis this, the speaker gave his views on the evolving insurance ecosystem.

3. Insurtech industry is thriving through ground-breaking innovations that is increasingly focusing to solve some real problems from motor insurance to climate change to sustainability issues. Now looking at leaders like Allianz partners, the company has been working many such initiatives one of which is the partnership with Irish Insurtech BlinK and the introduction of the Automotive Innovation Centre that focuses on future mobility including telematics and engineering. With this, the speaker shared some of key initiatives of Allianz Partners in the Insurtech Space.

4. Asia-Pacific is one of the diverse markets for insurers. It is a newly emerging and attractive market for insurance products as it is home to nearly one-third of the world population, few of the fastest-growing economies in the world such as China and India which is expecting to be the world's largest economy by 2030, and multiple countries with rapidly expanding middle-class population. Considering this, the session touched upon Allianz Partners unique positioning of insurance with respect to service, technology & practices specially in APAC.

Speaker Bio: Vinay Surana - is the Asia Pacific - Chief Executive Officer at Allianz Partners. Vinay is based in Sydney, Australia and he leads the Asia Pacific business with responsibility for Australasia, China, Japan, India and South East Asia. Vinay brings over 20 years of global experience in the financial services industry to his current role. Prior to joining Allianz, Vinay held the position of Senior Vice President, Head of Individual Personal Insurance for Asia Pacific within AIG, where he spent more than 13 years in various senior executive positions across numerous markets within Asia, the United States and Australasia. His expertise ranges from insurance and underwriting, strategic planning, reinsurance, risk management, partnership development and digital enablement as well as Insurtech to name a few.

Insurance is the fourth most disrupted industry and the one inclined to the most disruptions in the coming years. Much of the transformations are a result of the growing adoption of mobile technology, AI, ML, cloud and data technologies to name a few. So essentially, these technologies are redefining how insurance products and applications for services like claims processing, fraud detection, underwriting and risk management are distributed and managed. And, in other words, these new digital trends in insurance have given rise to a tide of technology driven insurance companies – which we know today as the Insurtechs.

With this, we moved on to discuss the following:

1. Insurtechs are fast-moving, digitally enabled enterprises that are identifying and capitalizing on the weakness of traditional insurers in fields like auto insurance, P&C insurance, liability and home insurance with highly valuable offerings for customers. As a result, the entire industry is re–examining its solutions and delivery models that are weak and exploring opportunities for innovation with disruptive new technologies. Considering this, the speaker gave her views on how key trends like Customer Engagement and Digital Data Management can get disrupted by emerging technologies that can have a profound impact on the industry.

2. As a following question to the previous, we discussed on other opportunities with new-age technologies that can impact the commercial insurance sector.

3. Insurers are adopting emerging technologies to digitally transform their services and drive themselves forward in the digital world. However, insurers must be farsighted and strategic about the technologies they adopt and consult with experts on the best approach to going digital. With this, the speaker gave her valuable advice to insurers to help them avoid being blindsided by disruption in insurance. In other words, the speaker addressed how better strategies and vision can help insurers deal with such technology disruptions.

4. Moving towards the current market scenario, changing risk landscapes and worsening loss ratios are shifting the role of commercial insurance companies from risk mitigation to risk prevention. Additionally, the pandemic has put new pressures on business models as well which are increasingly making digital transformation a top priority for insurance carriers. Some of the main themes that are coming out of this are behavioural economics, IoT, and telematics. With this, the speaker gave her views on telematics and real-time monitoring technologies that can offer more flexible and usage-based insurance (UBI) products in the coming days that are beneficial for both the provider and the customer.

Speaker Bio: Parul Kaul-Green, is the Chief of Staff, APAC and Europe at AXA XL. Prior to this, Parul was the Head of AXA NEXT Labs Europe at AXA UK Group.

Parul is also a board member of UK Insurtech board at Tech Nation, which aims to promote UK’s position as Global Insurance leader. She was recognised as Top 17 Powerful women in Insurtech in 2020 and features on the Women in Fintech Power list  for Global Fintech Industry. She is a mentor at Pitch@Palace & Mayor of London’s International Business Partnering and Business Growth Programme. Besides, she is also an advisor to Insurance Times on Technology and Innovation. Lastly, Parul is one of the key contributor / author to “The AI Book”.

The insurance sector, in riding the wave of the FinTech phenomenon, has been rapidly expanding, with a slew of firms having emerged to provide ‘Insurtech’ services. These services incorporate concepts such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, digitalisation, and the sharing economy to various aspects of the insurance industry. This profusion of technology brings with it the promise of various benefits in increasing efficiency and lowering costs for not only insurers and intermediaries, but also businesses or consumers as end users of insurance. However, if we dive deeper, the development of Insurtech comes with corresponding risks and regulatory concerns not currently accounted for by the traditional regulatory model.

With this, we moved on to discuss the following:

1. Insurtech has been a growing force around the world, as evidenced by increasing Insurtech investment funding from 2011 until Q2 2021. How can we expect this scenario moving forward? Will there be more inclination towards mergers and acquisition or will there be a massive sum of venture capital still flowing into multiple new start-ups looking to tackle different niches in the vast insurance sector.

2. Insurtechs are increasingly looking to find applications throughout the life cycle of an insurance product, like from product development, underwriting and distribution to administration and claims processing. With this, how can we expect technology getting leveraged to benefit insurers as well as customers in each of these phases of the life cycle.

3. The insurance industry consists of potential prejudice and discriminations particularly when they collect and apply data. For example, the question of whether it would be fair for an insurer to use personal data from social media or networks to evaluate a customer’s risk profile does not admit of any easy answer and such prejudice may manifest as higher insurance costs. Considering this, the speaker gave his views on - how insurtech can best tackle such situations.

4. Can we better promote innovation in insurance? If we see from the compliance side, regulators should adopt a more liberal attitude towards the rise of Insurtech. In-fact, regulators should consider how to create the proper environment to foster innovation. Listen in to know Steve's view on this pressing global challenge.

Speaker Bio: Steve Tunstall, is the CEO & Co-founder of Inzsure. Inzsure is your digital partner throughout the entire insurance cycle from procurement to claims and renewals. So don’t forget to check out inzsure.com to learn more. At Inzsure, Steve is responsible for managing all aspects of the business, including strategy, finance, sales and marketing.

Prior to Inzsure, Steve has 30 years of experience and has managed five companies in four countries including two previous start-ups. Based in Asia for most of his career with experience in dozens of countries globally, Steve brings a broad-based approach to the management of both risk and opportunities. To name some, his previous roles included: Head of Compliance, Insurance, Legal and Risk at Cathay Pacific and risk advisor to the rest of the Swire Group, Vice President of Risk for Genting Singapore & Resorts World Sentosa (RWS) and Managing Director for Jardine Pacific, Schindler Lifts Singapore. Steve also holds the following positions: General Secretary at the Pan Asian Risk & Insurance Management Association (PARIMA) and Asia Ambassador at the International Insurance Society.