The latest trends of insurance

There are many trends in many fields, but " What is the latest trend?" is a very general question, and that many people dont know, the following is some information you need:

An insurance organization typically has 7 major functional areas :-

Sales, Underwriting, Claims, Risk Management, Rating, Investments & Re-insurance and Policy Administration.

The tremendous growth in technology reflects in the different functional areas in the insurance.

Sales - Earlier insurers relied on brokers to sell insurance policies. This was a big reason for the policies to have high prices. Once start-ups like Policy Bazaar came into the picture, it resulted in closing a lot of information gap enabling the customers to compare policies and choose the appropriate coverage. Selling insurance policies online is the biggest leap insurers have taken in this front

Underwriting - Insurers are coming up with newer ways to price/underwrite insurance policies. The usage based insurance in Auto Insurance aligns the customers’ driving behaviour with the policy prices. The insurers use a telematics device (with the customer’ permission) to track their driving behaviour based on which the premiums are priced.

In the Health Insurance space, insurers are offering discounts to customers if they let them track their exercise behaviour through the use of wearable technology that tracks activities.

Claims - Claims is a vast space for improvement and the insurers around the world have done well in terms of adopting technology wherever applicable.

Insurers are using drones for increased on-site assessment than physical assessment that would incur more costs. Elsewhere, insurers are cutting costs further by using an uber like video service for desktop assessment. The videos would be supplied by an Uber-like network of smartphone users and, eventually, also drone operators rather than a single drone thereby improving accuracy and reducing costs.

As we head towards a terminator/star trek kind of a world, some insurers have shown this by using Bitcoins and Blockchain technology in insurance. Blockchain (through Smart contracts) helps to reduce the claims cost drastically and automate the claims handling process thereby improving customer satisfaction too.

Further big data is acting as a crucial component in improving the entire claims process.

The insurers around the world have realised that insurance is no more an age old concept. With changing times, the insurers need to adapt too and they have taken baby steps towards this!