"What's dangerous is not to evolve." Let me ask a loaded question that might ruffle a few feathers: How successful do you think Amazon would be if it only responded to 40-50 percent of the orders customers placed online? It may sound absurd, but this is exactly the predicament many commercial insurance brokers and agents are put in every day when they submit an application to a carrier on their customer's behalf. A lack of automation in the submission intake process means that many carriers can only respond to less than half of the submissions they receive simply because they get too many. For business that the carrier doesn't want to write, it's not uncommon for distribution partners to receive no response at all. Can you think of another industry where this would be acceptable?

Last year's Cyber Monday was the biggest single shopping day in Amazon's 25 year history, but the company's success has led to problems for the country's recycling industry. The number of annual deliveries through the US Postal Service, Amazon's default delivery method, has doubled over the last decade, going from 3.1 billion in 2009 to 6.2 billion in 2018. The extraordinary growth of cardboard waste from shipping materials has been dubbed'the Amazon effect' at many waste removal and recycling companies. Waste management and recylcing firms have begun to call the enormous growth in packaging materials that end up in the trash as'the Amazon effect' According to a report in The Verge, corrugated cardboard accounts for close to half of the curbside recycling material in New York today, compared to just fifteen percent in 2003. The enormous increase in residential packaging materials has come at the worst possible time, as in 2018 China, formerly the world's largest recycler, began refusing shipments of recyclable cardboard from the US in instances where it was contaminated by .5 percent or more of other material.

It's that time of year again…Time to take stock of an incredible year for the financial services industry (not all of it good, sadly) and look forward to the trends we see impacting finance marketers in 2019. Last year we predicted the New Payments Platform (NPP) rollout, expanded fintech regulation sandbox, and widespread adoption of blockchain as the biggest trends of the year. While they may not have been the biggest stories (Royal Commission, anyone?), they continued to move the Australian finance industry forward and saw technology increasingly used to meet customer needs. Xinja, Volt, 86400 and Up, are all at various stages of gaining a banking license and launching offers, which they claim will offer alternative ways to bank for Australians. Exactly what that means is yet to be revealed.

The rumors continue to swirl about Amazon's entry into the insurance space. Its first step appears to be developing a UK-focused insurance comparison site, according to Reuters. Given Amazon's deep capabilities as a marketplace, and its consumer reach, such a move is a reminder that even the insurance sector is not immune to the power of the Amazon effect. Amazon is already in the home with Alexa and top of mind with Prime, so it's a natural extension of its reach designed to benefit consumers. A few years ago, Google similarly tested an insurance comparison site that failed.

Amazon is changing the way products and services are delivered to customers, and so will autonomous vehicles, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang believes. The "Amazon effect," Huang said, will turn transportation on its head. Autonomous technology will play a big role for more point-to-point movement of products and people. Amazon has announced Prime Air, a future-looking program in which unmanned aerial vehicles will deliver products in under 30 minutes. Nvidia is backing the idea of autonomous cabs, and providing hardware and mapping technology for accurate point-to-point navigation.