The Future of Innovation in Insurance: It's in the Data

Joe Schueller

September 19, 2022 | professional

Reposted from the Holmes Murphy blog. Co-authored with Jeffrey Austin White.

Have you ever opened your mail to discover a medical bill with an unpaid balance that you thought your group health plan would have already covered? Were you ever involved in a car accident and could not find your insurance card or the phone number to report a claim?

Circumstances like these make insurance frustrating, inconvenient, and often, a negative experience for the buyer. This is where insurtech comes to the rescue with the specific aim to make insurance simple, transparent, and affordable in hopes to restore the confidence of the policyholder in the insurance value chain.

What is insurtech?

Insurtech — inspired by the word fintech — is a portmanteau of “insurance” and “technology” and refers to the use of technology to enhance or automate insurance services. Where innovations that emerged over a decade ago from the fintech revolution like mobile banking, crowdsourcing, social lending, and blockchain forced traditional financial organizations to rethink their business model, so are insurtech innovations forcing traditional insurance carriers to re-examine their client experience, policy concepts, and appetite for specific types of risk where they can excel and not be just one more insurance package on the shelf.