Earlier this month,
Accenture released a report which revealed that one in 13 medical patients will have their personal data compromised by cyber attacks between the years 2015 and 2019.
While this may be frightening on an individual level, industry leaders believe that exposures such as these will house the next wave of opportunities needed after autonomous vehicles diminish the auto insurance industry.
“Carriers will need to make up for those missing auto insurance premiums, which may be the largest push in their revenues,” said Neil Betteridge, vice president of strategy, Guidewire. “Areas like cyber or other gaps where they can expand is where they’ll look to start serving.”
Betteridge points to the Canadian Automobile Association (CAA) as one entity in particular that has adapted well to the evolving market.
“We have customers like the CAA who has been in insurance since 2012 expanding outside of Ontario and getting creative in partnering with ACE Private Risk Services to go after new market segments,” he said.
The result of that collaboration is CAA Distinct, a product for high-net-worth clients that’s backed by ACE’s global coverage. While CAA’s expertise primarily lies in the auto sector, a few tweaks allowed it to provide other solutions elsewhere.
More organizations are likely to follow suit.
“I think we’re going to see more carriers getting creative in repositioning and expanding into new business as risk changes and moves,” Betteridge said.
In addition to this eye toward new business lines, existing general insurance professionals can also gain revenue by enhancing their current policyholders’ experience through a more strategic use of data.
“We’re seeing our insurer clients pay more attention to what they can do with data, and paying more attention to cultivating and curating it,” Betteridge said.
The 2013 Calgary floods provide a good case study for this.
“Some insurers leveraged data digitalization to identify who their policyholders were so they could warn them and line up suppliers to come in and take care of remediation afterwards,” Betteridge said. “There are some great opportunities in data and analytics to deliver a great customer experience and do things that policyholders will see as valuable.”
