Are you optimistic about the future?
I had the pleasure of joining one of Post Magazine and the Chartered Insurance Institute’s round table discussions on technology yesterday. As a self-confessed social media geek it was good to be sat with a cohort of online evangelists as well.
Without giving away too much of what was said – an article will shortly appear in Post – the conversation touched on the very nature of risk and whether technology could remove some of what the insurance industry is there to protect, such as self driving vehicles rendering motor insurance redundant.
Meanwhile, the prevalence of publicly available data and how this might be put to use in underwriting or claims settlement - a subject covered by Insurance Edge before – was debated at length.
From my own point of view, I was keen to talk about how we navigate the web and use our online profiles and the data within them to obtain goods and services. I believe insurers, brokers and aggregators will catch onto the rise of the Application Programming Interface, which helps us log into sites we like using our linkedin profile or twitter handle. This will become increasingly sophisticated and consumers will learn to understand the value of the data that they purvey around the internet.
The best thing about discussions like this is that they generally give way to a sense of optimism about the future. We are after all in a situation where global economics is putting huge pressure on growth and there still seems to be no real change in prospect. But add technology to the equation and the perspective can change significantly.
About Ralph Savage
