Why the rise of insurtech should matter to actuaries

We define insurtech as the use of emerging hardware, software and user interfaces to address inefficiencies or opportunities in the insurance value chain. Further, we think of the intersection of two dimensions as the focus of our discussion: industry specificity solutions and more recently established market players or solutions. Annual insurtech startup funding volumes have grown substantially since 2015. Global funding broke the $2.5 billion mark in 2015, up from an average of approximately a half- billion over the prior three years. Insurtech startup funding continued strong reaching a record $7 billion in 2020 despite the pandemic and exceeded $15 billion in 2021.