Insurers who integrate new technology into their operational decisions enjoy exponential growth. New developments in insurance technology benefit both insurance companies and their policyholders — whether through encouraging safer driving or offering a seamless onboarding customer experience.
Increase in Data
The use of technology that collects and shares data in real-time has exploded in the last couple of years.
Wearable devices such as fitness trackers and smart home appliances have generated large volumes of insightful data.
Insurers can leverage the latest insurance technology to better understand their policyholders on a deeper level, which helps them develop customizable insurance products with fast delivery.
Telematics
Telematic devices are installed in vehicles in order to monitor drivers’ habits. Of course, this data is then shared with the insurance company. The information is then used to help price policy rates and enhance underwriting processes.
Insurance companies can give advice to their policyholders on how to be better drivers. For instance:
The driver should apply the brakes more gently when driving around corners.
Therefore, carriers offer more accurate prices since they use reliable data from reliable instead of relying on generic and not particularly insightful data that they receive from customers.
Blockchain
Blockchain is a digital distributed ledger network used to securely store records and transactions since the data can never be deleted.
Insurance companies can use blockchain to enter their data along with participation level, thereby stating their commitment in a transparent way without relying on a central clearing authority.
However, it’s going to take a long time for blockchain to be used by the insurance industry.
Insurance carriers that wish to deploy blockchain technology have to overcome enormous regulatory and legal challenges. Remember that the insurance industry is an extremely slow-moving sector— it took them a long time to implement cloud computing.
Business Rules Engines
Today insurance providers need to make changes to existing products and reduce their time to market with new services immediately and without mistakes.
Traditionally, these sorts of mission-critical tasks required a team of experienced programmers to plow through the company’s legacy code.
Rules engines have played an integral role in the digital transformation of the insurance industry.
A rules engine allows carriers to drastically cut down the time to market, boost collaboration across the entire organization, and enable subject matter experts to have full control of their insurance products.
IoT and Rules Engines
Insurance providers need to manage the vast quantities of data they collect from connected equipment, such as fitness trackers and smart appliances. To do so, they need is a software solution that can make adjustments and make new decisions. What they need is a business rules engine.
Based on privacy settings that policyholders choose, carriers can send alerts or text messages warning them of potentially risky actions:
- A door is not locked when the residents leave the apartment.
- The temperature in a room becomes extremely high but the smoke detector isn’t going off.
- The policyholder’s heart rate is too high, which isn’t the result of physical activity.
With real-time data to help policyholders to cut down on both risks and costs, the entire insurance industry becomes a partner that encourages a better quality of life.