The Digital Insurance innovation faceoff opening remarks & winner announcement

The Digital Insurance Innovation Faceoff will feature presentations of cutting-edge products, technologies and services developed by leading suppliers to address industry challenges and support digital transformation. Faceoff is aimed at advancing insurance digital transformation and recognizing excellence.

Transcript:

Penelope Crosman (00:10):

Good morning. Welcome back to day three. Great to see everybody. Thank you for coming back and sticking with us. Our third day. Yesterday we had, oh, and I'm Penny Crosman with Arizent. By the way, yesterday we had 10 demos. They were all good. It was an interesting session. Our judges picked one winner and I'm here to announce who the winner is and the winner is Nuance.

Nathan Golia (00:45):

I thought I saw them here. Megan, are they here? You guys can come up to get the award.

Penelope Crosman (00:51):

So yeah, Rick Morian is here to accept the award.

Nathan Golia (00:59):

And Kevin, we'll get one picture. Yeah.

Rick Morian (01:02):

Congratulations. Thank you. I kind of thought you were going to pop up. Hey, thanks. Appreciate your time.

Penelope Crosman (01:38):

Congratulations again. And now to kick off the rest of the conference is Nate Golia, editor in chief at Digital Insurance.

Nathan Golia (01:47):

Thank you Penny. Wow, what a long couple of days it's been, huh? We had so much happen starting with our masterclasses early on Monday. Anyone still here who went to a masterclass? We've got to, I hope you guys got some good information there. Those were a lot of fun to get launched this year and we're looking forward to your feedback on getting those in for next year as well and expanding that program. Of course. It was interesting, we had Penny Penny's taken on a new role at Arizent to sort of, she's the FinTech expert for American Banker and she's going to be helping all the technology reporters, including digital insurance and across brands. She did a great job helping me out with the PNC while I had to do things like judge the demos, which was a little intimidating at first, but turned out to be a lot of fun. I really enjoyed seeing all those. So let's give you a quick overview of how today's going to go in a few minutes. I'm going to bring up Janet King, who's our VP of research. She and I are going to present some of our digital insurance proprietary research that we do every year into basically what I call the state of insurance digital transformation. Taking a look at what carriers are thinking, what Insurtechs are thinking, are we finding that alignment? And this year was an interesting one. It was been between last June when we did last year and this year. Think about how much has changed or just in general sort of conditions have changed around Insurtech and insurance. We of course talk about the supply chain crunch. That of course started a little bit earlier in 2022, but really hit its stride that summer according along with housing prices, which roses and roses and roses and then are starting to come back to earth a little bit. And of course housing prices impact insurance shopping and budgets in a lot of ways. Also, we have of course climate concerns that are increasing across the industry, especially for PNC. For PNC. And actually if you're flying back to the East Coast, I dunno how many, is anyone flying back into the smoke into the Northeast? Yeah, I live in Charlotte now. My parents and my family and a bunch of my friends live in Rochester, New York, which now has the worst quality in the country. So I'm sure the local tourism board is trying to figure out how to spin that positively. And of course my dad and my aunt are sending me messages. Oh, it's so bad. We've never seen anything like it. I used to live in Utah and occasionally we'd have some pretty smoky skies from regional wildfires. And if you've been to the past, dig into, you probably heard me talking about looking out my window at a mountain that's on fire and then looking panning over and there's like million dollar homes that are on the mountains in the path of the wildfire and overseeing a lot of those impacts where people are building valuable property and then trying to get it insured. But in the path of some of these climate impacts, you're pushing into those areas at the same time that they're increasing or becoming more intense depending on how you're looking at it. So really a lot of interesting digital angles there. Thinking about how to leverage data and understand risk and how to reach out to customers, how to make sure they're staying safe, how to get early detection and all those things as well. All those things that we cover at Dig in a lot of fun. And of course can't go, it can't let the little recap of the past year go on without talking about SVB and just the impact on insurtech funding and what does it mean for a community of startups and founders in all industries. But of course the one that we're most intimately familiar with here at insurance as the funding realities change and we're doing some reporting about how that's playing out and how that's changing as well. So just it's a thrill a minute in the insurance industry. I do want to say, tell one funny story that I got this morning. Obviously they're three hours ahead. So I've woke up to a whole string of like, oh, can you believe this guy in our family thread? And then my dad, my grandmother is 88, my grandfather's 96, they live in Rochester. And I said, well, I'm a said, I just kind of made an offhand remark. Well I'm assuming they're not even going near a window today. And my dad said, you know what, I'm going to check on him. And he calls my grandfather and he goes, oh, your grandmother went out for a walk and she's 88 and it's like basically says, do not go outside if you're 88 is like the whole warning. And then she goes for a walk. Well, she brought a mask. He said, we still have masks from Covid. We brought a mask. Well, great. So that, again, a little bit of what I was talking about the other day, which is just that people are unpredictable and that's really what it all comes down to here. We can apply all this data. We've had talks starting on the first day with Eric Siegel about predictive analytics and building models to measure risk. And really at the end of the day, you just kind of got to close your eyes and say people are going to do what they're going to do. And as insurers, I know that makes us all crazy, but it was a fact of life. But anyway, I think that's enough introduction. I can bring Janet up now. Are we good to go with the slides? Alright, so Janet and I are going to go over the state of insurance digital transformation.