Predicting and preventing loss, not simply reimbursing it
For example, people want to stay healthy. So the objective for insurers today, anno 2030 is to keep the insured healthy with all kinds of digital services, such as medical assistance, fitness monitoring, dietary advice, specialized apps, wearables and smart devices. Another example: drivers, obviously, prefer not to have car accidents. So why not teach them to drive better via digital technology, based on data from their and other smart cars? Or why not prevent burglaries, as an insurer, by securing the insured home and neighborhood?
This way, insurers do what customers want most: predict and prevent loss. They can achieve this by unveiling a range of services, bespoke to the customer, within the different areas of insurance coverage: mobility, health, retirement, etc. This would create one seamless customer experience, where the insured enjoys all those services through one digital platform, leveraging an ecosystem of partners.
Similarly, insured parties today know exactly what they are paying for, namely, support to prevent risk, through regular contact. This also gives the insurer more positive touch points, improves its relationship with the customer and increases customer satisfaction and loyalty.
In partnership with big tech and insurtechs
Insurers find plenty of technological solutions to provide these services from insurtechs. They have grown to become technology partners for insurance because while they had the new technology, they lacked customers, the brand recognition and the financial resources. Big tech companies have also become partners. Insurers continue to use their cloud services. And in return, big tech, with customer consent (and a push from the regulator), shares data with the insurer, making it easier for the insurer to build on and extend its services.
Although big tech has not taken over the insurance world, it is fully intertwined with the economic system so that insurers have not been pushed out. In other words, insurers continue innovating to leverage these partnerships.
So who stands today as an insurer?
On the one hand, there are some insurers that were and are still strong in covering niches. The generalist insurers that are growing and thriving have open mindsets that encourage innovation and creativity. Insurers must focus on what else the customer wants: how they can create an offering that the customer won't pass up. To bring this about insurers will have to exploit proprietary data, big-tech data and insurtechs. They will also have to develop digital platform initiatives that deliver and scale.
This, by the way, is why decentralized approaches failed. Rather than decentralizing and democratizing insurance, recentralized apps took over. And then someone came along and aggregated those recentralized apps and bundled them together. This was achieved by the generalist insurer, in partnership with big tech and insurtechs.
