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Serverless — Take the POWER Back #2

Last week I spoke about an idea which I think can potentially create a new way of working with personal data while opening up new frontiers for personalisation and data privacy. This week I would like to explore the benefits of the approach in an Insurance context.

The idea is simple

• A User stores data within a personal datastore which is not accessible to anyone but the user — Let us call this the Data Wallet.
• Using a Serverless technology the User may allow 3rd party data processors to process and analyse the data within the user’s ‘Private Application Context’. The 3rd Party Data Processors are implemented as Functions on a Serverless Platform.
• The User may then provide the results to 3rd party services without revealing their identity and yet have personalised results.

A ‘real’ world example of this could be

• The user’s driving history which would be stored along with relevant personal details (age, gender etc) in their Data Wallet.
• The user would trigger from a UI(the Function Marketplace) the download and execution of a Serverless Risk Calculation Function created by an Independent Software Provider on their data. The function would review the driver’s information and calculate a Risk Profile.
• The Risk Profile can in turn be provided to various insurance sites without revealing the user’s identity to get a quote. Or be provided to a 3rd party service which then finds the best quote on behalf of the end-User.

Some of the benefits of this approach are the following

• The User is likely to provide much more data than they would otherwise be ready to provide directly to a 3rd party.
• The data can be regularly enriched for various purposes and be available in it’s fullness to multiple service providers whether they be Insurance Providers or Insurance Brokers or Renewal reminder services.
• The data can be processed by multiple processing algorithms for a variety of use cases (insurance, driving optimisation, renewals, providing to authorities etc.).
• The User may monetise their data by allowing it to be used for Market Research by renting their profile.

The above scenario is one of many that I will continue to explore over the next couple of weeks. From a technology perspective it can be implemented today using combinations of Database as Service with Serverless such as AWS Dynamo together with AWS Lambda or sometime further down the road using Blockchain based approaches such as Blockstack and Blockchain Scripts.