The Importance of Consistency in Fintech Branding in the Insurtech Sector
Insurtech, referring to insurance technology, is one of the hottest financial industry sub-sectors alongside the likes of fintech (financial technology) and regtech (regulatory technology). The industry exists to find and use technological innovations in the insurance sector in order to gain efficiencies and cost savings.
For decades the insurance industry and the insurance model has stayed consistent with the times; however, considering the latest changes and impressions in the market and world landscape, the world has turned to an age of digitalization. For years the insurance industry was not able to catch up; however, the industry has since changed with the introduction of insurtech. With insurtech startups on the rise, the insurance industry is positioned for the future.
Insurtech companies explore avenues such as limiting exploitation by large insurance players by offering ultra-customizable insurance policies for every need, social insurance, and insurance alternatives. Insurtech companies use and track new sets of online data from internet-enabled devices to provide price premiums or discounts according to observed individual behavior.
With traditional insurance, individuals often overspent on protection based on the rudimentary basic level of data and information provided to categorize individuals. Insurtech startups are attempting to tackle this information by finding new ways to gather data efficiently and finding better sources of data than ones typically analyzed by traditional large insurance companies. By analyzing inputs from cellular devices, including geolocation tracking of motor vehicles and activity tracking of wristwatches, insurtech startups are building and exploring more finely delineated groups of risk. This allows for more customizable insurance policies and products that can be priced more competitively that target different groups of people, including groups that traditional insurance companies would not cover.
In addition to more efficient insurance pricing models, insurtech startups are testing the waters and looking into other potential game-changing innovations. These include deep learning trained artificial intelligence (AI) to calculate the right mix of policies to complete an individual’s insurance coverage and AI to handle the typical tasks of insurance brokers. Other ideas include: gathering all policies into one platform for monitoring and management, creating on-demand insurance policies for micro-events, and group insurance coverage using the peer-to-peer payments model.
Importance and Impact of Insurtech
Insurtech startups are playing an important role in changing the way insurance coverage is applied and paid for. Insurtech is enhancing consumer experiences by leveraging technology to create choices and options for consumers. This way, consumers are able to stay more engaged in the coverage selection process. By understanding consumer needs, insurtech companies are able to provide a more personalized and engaging service.
The future of insurtech is moving towards a digital self-service model where consumers can easily choose and figure out which insurance coverage policy to get without a representative present. With the complexity of insurance taken out of the equation, insurtech companies are able to remove the need to visit a physical location or talk to an online representative to discuss one’s insurance coverage options. Without a physical brick-and-mortar location or online representatives, insurtech companies are able to save money and overhead on employees and keep everything strictly digital with artificial intelligence
Insurtech also promotes efficiency by providing online resources to policy-holders and policy-seekers. This way, consumers can have access to understandable information at any given moment without the need to speak to a representative to discern and understand the difference between insurance coverage policies. The ease of information also allows for individuals to figure out what exact policy they need and at what price point it’s available. This not only improves pricing but delivers more reliable, consistent coverage based on historical data.
Flexible, customizable, short-term, and transferable plans, plans that large insurance companies do not provide, are available with insurtech. Instead of needing to lock into long-term insurance arrangements, insurtech is able to provide an alternative that fits better with individual needs.
Lastly, insurtech companies are also able to detect and prevent fraudulent activity. By using and leveraging data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, analytics, and trend analysis, Insurtech startups are able to detect fraud more accurately and more consistently than large insurance corporations. By using this same technology, insturtech startups are also able to find potential loopholes within the insurance industry to give policy-seekers and policy-holders an advantage when assessing insurance coverage policies.