InsurTech Landscape 2019: Top 5 Takeaways

Well I just crossed my one year mark at Slice Labs. Happy anniversary to me! While this is my 26th year in the industry during which I’ve been a part of some pretty exciting initiatives that took me around the globe, this past year has been a whirlwind of learning, milestones and a glimpse of what we might see in the not too distant future. Joining Slice was like jumping out of a plane in mid flight and landing on a rocket. We launched a new digital insurer in Canada, rolled out a first-of-its-kind subscription cyber product in the US with AXA XL, launched the company in the UK and Asia Pacific, won a few industry awards, launched Slice Mind, our Lead Data Scientist was recognized as a global top 40 under 40, and we got to share our views at countless industry events globally. The interest and demand is very high, but as I have worked with insurers directly I’ve observed a few trends that are holding many back.

As an industry, we are overwhelmed with all the new tech that can transform our business from driverless cars (that will take a bit longer than we think), satellite imagery for wildfires, AI, and the power of drones. Any given insurer that attends one of the insurtech conferences is like a kid in a candy store. That’s great,but we can’t tackle all of these at once, we need to pick a specific tech and prove its potential value through a set of quick use cases.

2. We feel we need to do things the way we have always done them

After the excitement of seeing the shiny new toys at the latest insurtech conference at a hotel near you, you take some ideas back to HQ and then hit a wall. “Let’s do an RFP”... the pace of innovation and change is rapid; the landscape has changed. There are new ways to engage and evaluate a specific technology, business model or partner. We have noticed that via a hands on hackathon, you can learn nearly everything you need to know to dip your toes in the water, and at the end of that process you have something real and measurable to take to market. It might not be perfect but it will give you good insights.

For so long through my career, I did not really come across people with Innovation in their titles; now they are ubiquitous. I think it is great that insurers are dedicating so many people and teams to innovation. A few months ago we covered this topic via a podcast with Celent and Cooperators. Some really good pointers on innovation here. What I have noticed more often than I had hoped however, is the lack of a landing pad to execute on some of the innovative ideas/ concepts that those teams want to trial. The business should have bandwidth to implement innovation on a regular cadence. The innovation teams should be the ones on the critical path to have vetted new opportunities and drop them in a hopper. 

Over this past year we got to work with some great teams that recognize that we are undergoing radical changes in how insurance is perceived, sought, purchased and used. As a result, they also know that change won’t happen overnight. Therefore, we need to come up with new KPIs that allow us to determine viability and success of new concepts differently than we have in the past. We need to look beyond policies sold, loss ratios and profits. While all of those are important, give yourself enough runway to really test and learn, whether with a new product, segment, using AI for underwriting or claims, or alternate distribution. This being said it is also ok to fail. Just fail fast. 

The last thing that is certain however is that insurance will be different. From products, to the entire end user experience, whether it is still a stand alone insurance product or it is embedded as part of another delightful experience like subscribing to a car or going on an excursion to one of the 7 summits, there are too many forces at play to ignore the fact that our business will be different very soon.  Those that come out on top will be those that have their eyes where the puck is going versus where it is (hey, I am Canadian and the new season just started so of course I had to somehow weave in hockey). Working with these types of insurers and seeing real progress is quite exciting. 

What have you noticed this year?