Here it comes - from some of the sharpest minds at PKF, Munich Re, Swiss Re, EY, PWC, Deloitte, Brit, Talbot, Convex, Wakam, Chaucer, Concirrus, CyberCube, Blink, Riskbook, Flock, Zego, Insurtech Gateway, Voice of Insurance, Miller and FintechOS
Read MoreThe world is awash with data, but it's still surprisingly hard to find reliable statistics on what is happening in and around insurance. If you’re creating a business plan, sizing up a market opportunity, creating content, or assessing an investment, finding the data to make your case can be hard. Or expensive. I’ve been building and reviewing business plans for years and come across some great free resources to help me along the way. It was time to catalogue the sources, and having done that I thought I may as well share them with the wider world - so here they are.
Read MoreThe technology exists to define and deliver financial protection based on real-time reporting, using accurate, reliable and often free, data. Parametric covers are now in place across a wide spectrum of risk types and sizes, including cyber, health, earthquakes, hurricanes, drought and flooding.
Triggers include shake density, wind speed, water depths, or rainfall. Flight delays, footfall, and hotel occupancy rates have also been used as indices or triggers for less traditional risks.
This report from InsTech London, edited by Matthew Grant and launched in October 2020, ‘Parametric insurance: 2021 outlook and the companies to watch’ explores the history of parametric insurance, what it offers, what is coming next.
We review over 50 companies that we are following that are either demonstrating leadership in this space or are worth keeping an eye on in the future. Many of the founders or senior members of these companies have joined us for our events and podcasts in the last couple of years. Click through the links in individual company profiles for a chance to listen or read more about what they are doing.
Read MoreIf you’ve read Part One of this series "Parametric Insurance, your fast track to expertise" earlier this week you’ll have got your crash course in Parametric Insurance and can now call yourself an expert (relatively speaking).
Read MoreRead this and you'll be on your way to knowing more than 99% of what anyone else in insurance knows about a topic that's attracting a lot of interest. That makes you an expert in my opinion.
The debate is heating up just now about who should pick up the cost for messy losses - the kind that are hard to model, and frequently excluded or defined rather vaguely in insurance contracts. Right now, of course, all the focus is who should (and how to) cover the various costs arising from pandemics. Covid-19 today, and whatever hits us next time.
Read MoreWith the release today of the quarterly InsTech London podcast leaderboard, I've an excuse to reflect on some of the great discussions I've had with many of our favourite leaders, founders, investors and influencers in the last few months.
Read MoreInsurance has a fatal flaw. Few of us want to be reminded of how dangerous the world is. Cars crash, buildings burn, accidents happen. Usually to other people. So unless we are highly sensitive to risk, unusually thoughtful about the future or regulation requires it, we don’t care much about insurance.
Read MoreI read this week that the number of babies in England and Wales named Alexa dropped by more than half - from 301 in 2017 to only 118 - last year. That got me thinking about the names of people in insurance.
Read MoreThey sit in a hazy nether region between brokers and insurers. Outside of insurance most people will never hear of them. Even those that know of their existence are often only vaguely aware of the role they play. Yet MGAs (Managing General Agents) offer one of the best ways for new, and established, companies to enter into insurance and benefit from an existing large customer base or to take advantage of the best emerging technology.
Read MoreSocial media and conferences amplify, spread, and sometimes confuse the understanding of much of the new technology that is being offered to the insurance industry. AI appears to have become the latest “must have” for aspiring startups and innovative insurers. Four years into insurtech and we’re at risk of suffering from techno fatigue. Too much hype and we filter out, then ignore over-used expressions and claims for catch all solutions. Blockchain suffered that fate last year. AI could be next.
Read MoreUnderwriting commercial insurance is competitive. Margins are low. To grow profitably, insurers need to minimise the loss exposure across their portfolio and choose the clients that are likely to have the fewest losses. Better data, and the potentially powerful insights that can be extracted from it, is today widely recognised as being essential for all insurers.
Read MoreOn 6 July 1988 the Piper Alpha oil platform exploded. 167 people died. Much of the insurance was with what became known as the London Market Excess of Loss (LMX) Spiral, a tightly knit and badly managed web of insurance policies. Losses cascaded up and around the market. The same insurers were hit again and again. After fourteen years all claims had finally been settled. The cost exceeded $16 billion, more than 10 times the initial estimate.
Read MoreYou own a house. It burns down. Your insurer only pays out 15% of the loss.
That’s a serious case of under insurance. You’d wonder why you bothered with insurance in the first place. In reality, massive under-insurance is very rare for conventional property fire losses. But what about cyber insurance?
Read MoreFinding funding is the first major hurdle towards building a successful company. Then comes the pain of breaking out of Proof of Concept to get real sales. (Chris Downer of XL Innovate has written an excellent article about POC purgatory). But the death zone for B2B startups is often getting beyond the first couple of sales and creating a sustainable business.
Read MoreDespite the continued pervasiveness of digital into our lives, the physical and very analogue world of conferences is not just alive, but growing in the insurtech space.
It’s ironic that insurtech, which is predicated on the belief that a shift to digital will improve efficiencies in the insurance space, has itself spawned a new batch of conferences which exist to encourage face to face contact between buyers, sellers and investors.
Read MoreThe insurance market is frequently criticised for being stuck in the past. Senior management get blamed for a lack of interest in the latest technology. Bloated and inaccessible legacy systems with blinking green screens stifle efficiency. Customer engagement suffers from 20th century work practices with overworked call centres and too much reliance on paper.
Read MoreWe all love innovation but some insurtechs care too much about tech and not enough about insurance. Everyone knows the market needs to get more efficient. Eventually, a few companies are going to make a lot of money fixing that. But the lifeblood of insurance is providing products that help business and people when things go wrong. New problems need new solutions, which bring fresh sources of premium.
Read MoreInsurtech companies are emerging at the rate of over one a day and we are all self-publishing now. Twitter and Linkedin pump out real-time updates. Every day brings more opinions and an inbox full of insurtech news. So much choice, and too little time. How do we filter out the useful and important from the irrelevant and distracting?
Read MoreInstech London went on tour this week, heading north from the sand blasted railway arches of the Steelyard to the stripped back chic of WeWorks Moorgate. Tuesday 26th September saw us return to the Show & Tell format.
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