Library: Hiscox – How technology is positively impacting the insurance process

Executive summary:

BASS Underwriters’ Joe Good – actuarial analyst, and Hiscox London Market’s Paul Carnegie – line underwriter, commercial property, share their thoughts on the impact technology is having on the insurance process for insurers and their coverholders; from the pricing of risk, through to control, and the value of real time data.

Technology is changing everything

Mixing the traditional with the digital…

Joe Good: “No one is walking into a building in Wall Street and trading with paper slips anymore, why aren’t we doing the same thing with insurance policies? Why is everything digitised in the finance space but if I want to bind a policy in Lloyd’s I have to gather all these papers, stand in a queue, just to get it signed off? There have been some good steps forward taken, particularly as a result of covid lockdowns, but the whole process still has loads of room to improve – the technology hasn’t been applied to the insurance space like it has in other industries.”

“But, now, people are starting to flirt with it – we see companies like Lemonade – where it’s all technology-based underwriting. But you can’t just rely on digital distribution to replace the underwriting process. It can’t replace all the tradition and non-standard type processes that the industry has created over hundreds of years.”

“My perspective is you can use all these new tools – the digital distribution, the online platforms, the third-party data – as long as you have a team that also has the underwriting experience and knowhow. There are instances where you can eliminate the underwriting process and let producers bind away and use the actuarial science to steer the book – but when it comes to specialised or grey areas of risk, insurtech is not replacing that yet.”

“If you can couple both – tech and underwriting experience and knowhow – it’s a fantastic combination.”

Paul Carnegie: “Across the City of London there are algorithms and high frequency trading taking thousands of data points and making big decisions. A typical insurance underwriter on a big risk might ask 10-20 questions – don’t tell me that can’t be helped by technology? But you do need someone with strong underwriting expertise to control the machine.”

JG: “We use artificial intelligence to price risk that would take a whole actuarial team to do – it eliminates the needs for a team of five taking months to crunch out data for predictive pricing models. You can build these models in a short amount of time – two weeks or less. Cutting down time and resources.”

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