A few app pioneers have entered the marketplace for on-demand insurance in the past few years. Whether insuring cars, gadgets, homes or travel, these startups all promise swift and fuss-free protection.
But in the race to digitise and meet customer expectations, some of these new brands have struggled when it comes to managing risks. The challenge for digital insurers is to speed up and improve the user experience while simultaneously ensuring they’re not making things easier for fraudsters.
‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,’ said Robert Louis Stevenson. But optimism can quickly evaporate if you travel without insurance, as many discover after losing belongings or going through a medical emergency abroad.
Insurance is often the last thing you think of before going away, and because it’s not compulsory it’s all too easy to be cavalier about it. Research from ABTA shows that 25 per cent of holidaymakers went away without insurance in 2017, up from 22 per cent in 2016, and that younger travellers are the least likely to buy travel insurance. ABTA reports that 40 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds, and 38 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds, travelled uninsured between May 2016 and May 2017.
Applying for insurance has traditionally involved filling out a long form or spending an age on the phone with the insurer. But consumers are now coming to expect insurance to be sold like everything else is - whenever they want, wherever they are, and without any fuss or faff.
Very often a prospective insurance customer does not have the answers to all the questions being asked of them, meaning they have to guess, or worse, deliberately lie to get a better deal. This is where data enrichment and prefill combine to create a much-improved user experience and more efficient underwriting. With prefill, consumers provide only a small amount of information, such as name and address, and data enrichment takes over to automate the process.
A report on UK home insurance has underlined the benefits of data and analytics, and how technology providers can give insurers a competitive edge.
The report*, by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, is based on a study of digital trends among a cross-section of insurance professionals. It says that the use of big data has become the industry norm, with nearly all home insurers (89 per cent) now using data and analytics somewhere along the insurance chain.
However it found that only 57 per cent of them use data and analytics to price policies, while only 54 per cent use data to detect fraud.