The Big Picture

RGA's Dan Lyons discusses the rise of a fourth industrial revolution and identifies six strategies insurers are adopting to manage disruptive change. 

Resource asked insurance industry leaders to share their thoughts on what 2019 holds for sales and profitability, information technology, customer service and human capital. We also asked them to discuss the fraud risks and business disruptors they will face.

What effect will changing—and challenging—economies, politics, and regulations have on life insurance companies worldwide?

The age of traditional business partnerships is long past. Today, strategic partnerships offer life insurers the ability to expand their businesses into new ecosystems. Whether investing in insurtechs or collaborating with partners in complementary industries, life insurers can build partnerships based not only on strategy, product and services but also on the merging of technology and the sharing of platforms.

At the 2018 Life Insurance Conference, industry leaders discussed important issues and strategies that will shape the future of the industry.

Congress may have forced Mark Zuckerberg to reveal more about personal data gathered on Facebook (FB). But consider this: Your insurance company likely knows a lot more about you. 

Recently, blockchain has emerged as a technology that will potentially transform industries in a similar way that the Internet did a couple of decades ago. Still a nascent technology, many of its uses have not yet been discovered or explored.

The controversy surrounding the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica’s use of personal data harvested from social media accounts without the users’ permission is among the first of what likely will be a long series of public debates about how the use of “big data” can shape our lives. And one of the most obvious battlegrounds where we should expect such fights to play out soon is in the insurance industry.

Underwriting is not dying. It is just being automated into digital algorithms versus analog human beings.