Digital Transformation

“A New Idea: Insurers Creating Ecosystems Delivering Value to The Policyholders,” a session during InsureTech Connect 2021 focused on the current changes occurring to accelerate solutions for consumers.

With so many touchpoints across the insurance industry, and so many potential use cases, there is a lot of room for innovation — and there is a lot of room for failure. As an early adopter of AI technology, Harmon shares some of his key insights.

Digital Insurance spoke with Angela Orbann, vice president of property, PI product management at Travelers about how technology can optimize a home insurance policy and how artificial intelligence and satellite imagery is helping insurers.

What’s driving your digital claims transformation program: COVID? Competition? Or cost? Whatever the answer, we could be in danger of leaving the customer out of the equation in the rush to digitize and automate insurance processes. It could be time to take a more user-centric approach, reimagine the customer journey and find out what customers actually want.

In other news: Allstate closes $400M sale of New York life, annuity business; USAA partners with Blink by Chubb; Zurich North America implements Chisel AI.

Haven Technologies will make the platform behind MassMutal’s Haven Life available as a software-as-a-service insurtech.

The Palo Alto, California-based company is now valued at $900 million, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Recent EY research confirms how the pandemic fundamentally changed consumer needs, how they plan to increase their financial security, and what insurers can do to seize the opportunity.

Australian insurance startup Cover Genius Pty Ltd. boosted its valuation to A$1 billion ($729 million), after raising A$100 million from investors including G Squared and Japanese insurer Sompo Holdings Inc.

The past 18 months have uncovered a vulnerability in the insurance industry, as companies have struggled to maintain consistency in their processes in the face of remote working. Communication processes, in particular, have suffered and as a result, traditional insurers now face the real risk of losing customers to insurtechs and other more technologically advanced companies.

Insurtechs have secured more access to capital in the last few years and by the end of 2020 the total market cap of listed insurtechs surpassed $22 billion, according to the World Insurtech Report 2021.

Jerry launched a car insurance comparison service in 2019 using artificial intelligence and machine learning. The company has more than 1 million customers across the U.S. and has expansion plans.

The pandemic has served as a catalyst for putting digital transformation across insurance on the fast track, and claims is one of the focus areas that is primed for implementing digital capabilities. As more claims information is captured and managed digitally, new opportunities to leverage artificial intelligent technologies arise. This leads to a vision of full automation, high levels of straight-through processing, and (logically) a diminishing role for claims professionals.

Forrester research finds that even the most tech-savvy claimants want the reassurance of a human voice handling their claim.

In other news: Hippo launches Builders Program; handdii wins the 2021 ACORD Insurtech Innovation Challenge New York; Blockchain-backed title insurance launches in five states.

A new report, IT’s Changing Mandate in an Age of Disruption conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, supported by Appian, suggests that to continue with various digital transformations and increase adaptability for the future, some IT improvements must be made.

Truepic Inc., which helps companies like banks and insurers fight fraud by verifying images, raised $26 million in a funding round led by Microsoft Corp.’s M12 venture capital arm.

In other news: Ethos adds board members, new executives; One Inc partners with Mastercard on insurance payments; and Notion, a Comcast company, works with Honey Insurance in Australia.

Amazon will require third-party sellers to secure product liability coverage after reaching $10,000 in sales in one month on Amazon.