As every year, industry insiders choose their favorite technologies and business models. In this case, we are talking about a trend at his infancy, this making difficult to figure out what will happen in the next 12 months.
Less than 18 months ago, a lack of InsurTech startups was reported. Few days ago, a report featured over 1,000 startups operating in the industry.
Personally, I recognize that nothing is happening overnight in the insurance sector. Based on my daily discussions on this domain, I share with you my five most secret (and crazy) predictions:
1) Exit: There are out there great success stories: amazing InsurTech companies are obtaining concrete results and scaling up. I’m expecting to see some relevant exits, maybe an “unicorn”.
2) Reconversion: This is the other side of the moon. I saw many initiatives doing a great job putting together a fantastic team and a sexy equity story, some raised relevant capital but their business models (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-four-ps-insurtech-matteo-carbone?trk=mp-author-card) look (to me) not sustainable from an insurance perspective.
I don’t want to claim no one of them could succeed, the history have already shown how skepticism can be wrong. But I’m expecting to see some of those players use their great skills and the funding raised to change radically their business models.
3) Connected Insurance: My two cents are on any insurance solution that uses sensors for collecting data on the state of an insured risk and on telematics for remote transmission and management of data on the insurance value chain. A crazy prediction…? Let’s consider the most mature use case: auto insurance telematics in Italy, which represents one of the best practices globally. In the country, I’m forecasting more than 7,5 million cars connected with an insurance provider by the end of 2017 (compared to 4,8 million cars connected at the end of 2015).
4) Sustainability: Many value propositions are bundling risk covers and services, this allowing the insurer to influence behaviors and prevent risk, contributing to the sustainability of the sector. In the next months, I expect to see some insurers becoming more relevant in the life of their clients and act as partners and not only as claim players.
5) Culture shift: Incumbents are becoming always more interested in debating innovation and concretely testing new approaches, including collaboration with startups. I expect to see this new breeze sorround old style insurance institutions, with a growing awareness on how all the players in the insurance arena will be InsurTech players.
This is an exciting time to be in the insurance sector, actually!
FinSMEs
30/12/2016
About Matteo Carbone
Matteo Carbone is the Founder of the Connected Insurance Observatory, an insurance think tank which aims to grow internationally in 2017. He is a thought Leader in InsurTech and a Top 50 InsurTech Influencer