Climate change

Since 2017, there have been 86 weather-related disasters in the U.S. exceeding $1 billion in damage.

Climate change protesters in London have targeted insurance underwriting house Lloyd’s of London for its role in enabling fossil fuel projects.

Freddie Mac researchers led by Ajita Atreya found that homes directly exposed to projected sea-level rise command no discount over those that aren’t.

The insurance will initially roll out, sometime in the next year, in Africa.

Insurers protecting Florida’s homeowners are going under and it’s not the state’s storms dragging the firms down -- it’s a deluge of lawsuits and fraud.

The glass tower in Paris where Axa SA, one of the world’s largest insurers, has its temporary headquarters looks as if a giant feral cat has ripped chunks out of it. In recent months that jagged feeling extends inside, too, as senior executives prepared to claw off an extraordinarily profitable part of the company’s $20 billion business: the oil and gas clients whose ties to the insurer go back decades.

More than 126,000 commercial buildings in London are at risk from flash flooding. Climate change will heighten that threat.

More than 14.5 million single and multi-family homes were affected by natural disaster events last year. There was an estimated $56.92 billion in property damage.

We want insurers to transform from premium collectors to lifelong protectors. And technology is at the core of helping them achieve this.

The total losses and physical damages were estimated to cost $343 billion, well below the peak loss year in 2011 of $615 billion, however the 2021 losses, compared to 2011-2020 were about 4% higher than the average of $271 billion, according to the 2021 Weather, Climate and Catastrophe Insight report.

A recent study shows cyber incidents, business interruption and natural catastrophes are the most important global business risks for companies in 2022.

In 2020, natural disasters, excluding COVID-19, caused a total of $76 billion in insured losses, as opposed to the $7 billion in man-made insured losses. Companies must prepare to meet the demands of an increased customer base, including facilitating an easy claims process and expanding digital access.

The pandemic and industry challenges that lie ahead have fast-tracked innovation and a push for much needed modernization in the industry.

As we look ahead, evolving technologies are presenting home and auto owners with new potential risks. Hacking and ransomware, once confined to computer networks, may become an endemic cyber vulnerability for our increasingly connected vehicles and “smart home” devices. Yet many of these same technologies could create new data sources and risk mitigation options for personal lines insurers.

In other news: Online embedded insurance, Bubble launches; Obie partners with Munich Re company; Nintex, Insuresoft team up on digital transformation.

Breakthroughs in AI over the past decade mean we can now use it to train computer vision algorithms to perform visual tasks as accurately or more than humans. Smartphones can be turned into visual experts in your pocket, which can appraise some aspects of the environment better than people.

In a report titled Shifting Powers, academics at the University of Cambridge and experts at the insurance marketplace Lloyd’s of London try and imagine what that reshaped world is likely to look like.

As we emerge from the pandemic and look to the future, the case for cloud must be elevated beyond the limitations of IT savings, to how insurers can use it to address their biggest business challenges.

The disruptions created by the pandemic, natural disasters and a shifting workforce in the past year have challenged insurers to respond to market uncertainties with speed. Before looking at where technology met its goals and where there are opportunities for 2022, it bears noting how carriers mitigated uncertainty and aggressively charted a path forward. Carriers didn’t shy away from the need to digitize or accelerate movement to the cloud.

A group of the world's biggest insurers and reinsurers jointly pledging to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from their underwriting activities have run into an unexpected opponent of their planet-friendly mission: competition law.