The beginning of the year is usually the time to predict key trends for the year to come, and so it goes with the InsurTech sector as well. Most lists focus on the latest sexy technologies and applications, but after a year, we find these have hardly gained any traction, so cannot really be considered "trends." To call something a key trend, new and innovative isn't enough. It requires adoption at scale. We, therefore, decided to take a different approach, resulting in quite a different kind of list.

It cannot but do so in order to stay competitive in a technology-driven world where customers have ever increasing expectations regarding service delivery, with a clear tendency towards "on-demand". Initially the insurance industry has been slow to promote digital innovation, but shifting customer expectations together with an increased importance acquired by digital channels are forcing all players to seriously consider digital investments in order to offer customer-centric products and services. A tendency towards ecosystems can be identified as the insurance value chain is becoming more fragmented and boundaries between the classical roles of distributors, insurers and reinsurers are getting blurred. This transformation is affecting all phases of the customer journey and the insurance value chain. Let's face it, we all know the industry is not famous for its capacity to react fast and innovate.

With Brexit underway and Trump in the White House, 2016 was not a good year for forecasters. We will try to buck the trend by predicting which areas of InsurTech will have an impact in 2017. Futurologists have predicted mass adoption of self-driving, or autonomous, vehicles since cars were first invented. We are finally a lot closer to this vision; for example Google and Uber are running trials on public roads. The consensus view is that consumer-ready autonomous vehicles are 3 years away and ubiquity is another 10-15 years down the road (pun intended).

Until recently, insurance has been a virtual island in a sea of technological change. While innovators began disrupting banking and wealth management during the FinTech boom, which preceded the financial crash in 2008 -- not to mention also completely transforming the music, travel, taxis and booking industries -- insurance was happy to maintain its centuries-old business model, whilst also maintaining its aversion to deploying new technology. And for a trade built on its ability to quantify and price risks, it was startling to see just how unprepared the insurance industry seemed to be against technological disruption.

It was a little under three years ago when I wrote a blog entitled "where's the insurance tech in Fintech?" It was my first article on the subject and the #InsurTech social media label wasn't in the vernacular back then.