Summary This report discusses some of the ways insurance companies are innovating across the insurance value chain. GNW Key themes mentioned in this report include personalization, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and cyber insurance. After a tough few years, global insurance markets are showing signs of recovery, and with that recovery comes a new generation of innovation within the sector.The technological evolution in insurance is becoming an ever more important subject in the industry, with many insurance companies looking to make use of big data, blockchain, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and many other themes as part of their digital transformation. These innovations are improving customer satisfaction and allowing insurance to reach younger and less wealthy demographics across the world. Insurance companies that do not keep up with the innovation driven by market leaders will find themselves falling behind as time goes on.

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.

Today, customers expect their queries to be answered on their terms and as quickly as possible. What are the significant factors to create a superior customer experience? A PwC study states that nearly 80% of US consumers prefer the above-stated factors as the most important elements for a positive customer experience. Customers outside the US value time taken to offer more. Adoption of AI bot technology in insurance brings a "human touch" and helps insurers to "build real connections" with their customers without frustrating them.

Of all the recent buzzwords peppering discussions of insurance technology, artificial intelligence--or AI--is probably the most common and the most classic in terms of the latitude used. Like cloud, anything closely resembling or touching artificial intelligence gets the term. However, the technology is real and consequential, and insurers are alert and ready to use it. The challenges will be sorting out what are the most useful types of AI and what are likely to be the most successful business use cases. Those challenges are addressed in "AI Technologies in P&C: Insurer Progress, Plans, And Potential," a new survey-based research report by SMA (Boston).

Customer care powered by artificial intelligence gives insurers the opportunity to save 30% of their service costs. How can insurers meet increased customer expectations at a lower cost? AI-powered care delivers on a future vision of customer service with an opportunity for savings of 30% by, for example, driving customers to digital experiences. In this post, I will explore how to apply AI using an intelligent customer engagement (ICE) framework. In this blog series, I'm exploring the myriad ways in which AI adds value to financial services in general and the insurance value chain in particular. In my previous post, I defined the term AIQ and revealed and discussed three key ingredients to building a strong AIQ: technology, data and people.

How do you approach customer service and policy administration within your organization? In this blog post, I'll demonstrate how artificial intelligence (AI) and a raised AIQ can help you get the most out of your data. To do this, I'll discuss how insurers can use machine learning to analyze texts. Intelligent technologies are reshaping the way insurers approach the customer service and policy administration function. AI enables more efficient administration processes.

Insurance technology, also known as InsurTech, is an economic industry composed of companies that use technology to make insurance services more efficient. InsurTech is an integral part of the global FinTech revolution to bring more innovation to the financial sector in general. InsurTech involves exploring avenues that large insurance firms perhaps have less incentive to exploit, such as offering highly customized policies, social insurance, and using new streams of data from internet-enabled devices to dynamically price premiums according to observed behaviour. InsurTech attracted around $2.6 billion worth of investment last year, and market research analysts at Technavio predict that the global InsurTech market will grow steadily at a rate of 10% over the next four years. We reached out to some of the top influencers on our list to ask them for their views on InsurTech.

The insurance sector has entered a phase of profound transformation. Numerous Insurtech startups--around 1,000 according to Venture Scanner map--have popped up to challenge the traditional model by generating more than 16 billion dollars in the last years from insurance companies. I believe that we will see a completely changed insurance sector in the medium term. But I consider it a joke for an industry conference to show a picture of a newborn and sell it as the last intermediary or the last client to have purchased an insurance policy. I'm convinced that insurance companies will still be relevant in the future, or will become even more relevant than they are now, but these companies will have to be insurtechs, or players who use technology as the main enablers for reaching their own strategic objectives.

The insurance sector has entered a phase of profound transformation. Numerous Insurtech startups--around 1,000 according to Venture Scanner map--have popped up to challenge the traditional model by generating more than 16 billion dollars in the last years from insurance companies. I believe that we will see a completely changed insurance sector in the medium term. But I consider it a joke for an industry conference to show a picture of a newborn and sell it as the last intermediary or the last client to have purchased an insurance policy. I'm convinced that insurance companies will still be relevant in the future, or will become even more relevant than they are now, but these companies will have to be insurtechs, or players who use technology as the main enablers for reaching their own strategic objectives.