Trends for #Insurance: July 2020

This article is part of The Future of Insurance -LinkedIn’s Newsletter Series, authored by Dogan Kaleli. Click here to subscribe and get updates on the technology, customer & employee experience, future of insurance industry and trends!

In this edition, I’d like to introduce something new: Trends of the month for the insurance industry. A really impressive company called Trend Explorer will be supporting me on this. You can find more about them at the end of this article, but in a nutshell: it’s a platform where you can discover 30,000+ forward-looking trends in various industries, including insurance. You can use these trends for different reasons, from product development based on trends to your innovation management. So every month, we will be bringing 5 trends that we believe you should be aware of. Here we go for June:

Voice assistance for car insurance customers via Amazon and Google

The British insurance company LV=GI enabled its customers to clear up any questions they have on their car insurance via Amazon Alexa and Google Home. Equipped with the corresponding voice skills, the voice assistants are capable of answering around 500 policy-based questions from customers. The service will help put an end on searching through insurance documents and online channels. It’s estimated that the application will reduce some of the 28,000+ questions on policy documents that are received by call centre employees every month. This is a true game-changer for the customer experience, imagine if we can implement these capabilities in different companies, countries, for different products…

Furniture store sells insurance

IKEA started to offer insurance products to its customers. They started a partnership with the insurance company Iptiq, which is a subsidiary of SwissRe. For now, Customers in Switzerland and Singapore can purchase liability and household insurance via the IKEA portal. Customers also get a “cashback” bonus if they have no claims on the policy for a year. Companies with massive customer data getting interested in the insurance space is becoming a trend now, which ultimately serves best for the customer. Tesla willing to offer its own car insurance to Tesla buyers is another good example of this trend.

Selling your own health data

The American start-up Hu-manity.co wants to connect the users to companies and organizations through a model called “consent as a service” so that they can sell their medical information. Many companies offer free apps in exchange for data but the market for this has not yet been legally regulated. Hu.manity has launched this service that offers organizations and consumers fairer conditions for self-determined data trading. There is also support for a petition for the recognition of the right to one’s own data as a human right. I know data is the new commodity and the regulations around data and data privacy have started to form. First of all, from a social perspective, Hu.manity’s mission to make data a human right is simply amazing! From insurance perspective, instead of buying data with low confidence level, this framework would provide us with better data, trusted relationship with our clients and more data. Insurance companies can leverage this “data pool” and analytics capabilities in order to significantly improve our actuarial and underwriting models; and offer better products to our customers. I suggest you watch this video:

“Smart building” uses 5G, IoT and Blockchain

The Chinese building company China Construction Eighth Engineering Division has partnered with China Unicom to equip a large construction site in Beijing with a 5G network as well as IoT and blockchain technologies. As part of the project, more than 40 of the participating companies have upgraded their manufacturing facilities to achieve greater efficiency and protect workers better. This also includes the use of smart glasses that can send and receive information about the site via 5G. In this way, the engineers can monitor the work and relay instructions to workers while maintaining physical distance. For insurance industry, specifically risk engineering and underwriting, this represents a great opportunity: through these technologies, insurers can have access to real-time data, implement risk mitigation strategies together with customers in various industry segments.

Drones identify methane leaks

As you may know, methane emits less carbon dioxide (CO2) than fossil fuels such as coal, when burned for heat or power. But when it’s leaked directly into the air, the warming effect can be several times larger than CO2. Researchers at Southwest Research Institute have developed technology called Smart Leak Detection System/Methane, which uses drones armed with machine learning and computer vision to detect methane leaks in, for example, pipelines in real time. Watch this video for details:

The drones are fitted with medium-wave infrared cameras (MWIR) to allow them to autonomously identify methane leaks. SLED/M technology thereby reduces false alarms and also detects small leaks more reliably than conventional detection systems, which were developed to detect larger leaks. From an insurance perspective, this would support the industry to identify the methane leaks in order to minimize them in terms of climate change (and it’s indirect negative impacts on the insurance losses); and also support our risk engineers to develop risk mitigation strategies.

About Trendexplorer

Which change processes affect your company and your business model? Which trends offer potential for future innovations for your company?

TRENDONE Trendexplorer is a platform where you can discover 30,000+ forward-looking micro-trends in various industries. Micro-trends are innovative services, products or business models that shape long-term trends — for example Digital Currencies, Modern Work-style or Total Transparency.

If you want to take your innovation process to the next level, you can try Trendexplorer for free, and they kindly accepted to offer a 10% discount to our subscribers. Direct-message me or comment below, for the promo code. See the use-cases for strategic business development, product managers, innovation managers, R&D…

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#Insurance #Innovation #Technology #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #CarInsurance #Partnership #Transformation #Insurtech #FutureOfInsurance #Customer #DataAnalytics #Retail #SmartData #ComputerVision #Underwriting #HealthInsurance #Health #Data #5G #IoT #Blockchain #Drone #ClimateChange

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com and authored by Dogan Kaleli.