technology

The VP of Life Insurance for LexisNexis sees great opportunities for new startups in the life space.

Selfies may be most keenly associated with narcissistic young millennials on social media, but they could soon have very serious implications for a person’s future. A company in North Carolina has claimed it can take people’s selfies and use them to predict their life expectancies.

The Canadian life insurance industry is seeing a wave of innovation across multiple fronts. Evolving customer expectations, shifts in distribution, emerging technologies, big data, and the threat of nontraditional entrants have insurers looking to drastically change the way they do business.

Backed with new capital, powered by digital technology and chained to a decentralized administration: A new model for transparent, simple and customer-focused life insurance, couldn’t be easier to visualize.

One of the future challenges facing the life insurance industry is attracting human capital—finding the kind of high-quality employees it will need to be successful in a rapidly changing world. As Baby Boomers retire, companies must recruit, train and develop new generations who think, behave and work differently than past generations.

The Predictive Analytics & Accelerated Underwriting Survey Subcommittee of the Society’s Committee on Life Insurance Mortality and Underwriting Surveys has completed its report on the results of a survey designed to obtain feedback on several current hot topics in the industry, namely predictive analytics, accelerated underwriting and enhanced underwriting. This survey was sent to US and Canadian direct life insurance companies.

After three visits to Silicon Valley in three months I’ve come to the conclusion that InsurTech for the U.S. life insurance market has arrived. And the Genie isn’t going back into the bottle. U.S. InsurTech financing hit $1.377 billion in 2015, with the global figure about double that (CB Insights). No slowdown occurred in 2016.

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In an earlier Risk Insights article, we examined the bold claim for big data that the abundance and speed of information would make knowledge redundant. We concluded that if knowledge is understood as the body of causal explanations for observed statistical correlations, there could indeed be a grain of truth in such a claim, especially in the field of commercial applications.

One of the hottest topics in financial services these days is blockchain. First introduced as the technology behind the currency Bitcoin, its value and potential are now recognized much more broadly. While not everyone fully understands it, more and more people are talking about it.

3D printing or, as it’s also known, additive manufacturing, rapid prototyping or solid free form technology used to be the manufacturing industries best kept secret. This technology is now revolutionizing many industries not least medicine. 3D printing applications in medicine can provide many benefits from customization and personalization of medical products to organ replacement.