- There used to be a division between who offers banking and insurance products
- Now the same company can offer both - there is more generalised 'financial services' these day
- There are two areas where tech is having a big effects
- Insurance - InsureTech
- Calculating and offering insurance
- Regulation - RegTech
- Specifically regulating of the financial services industry
- Both enforcing regulations and spotting anomalous behaviour
- Traditionally involved a lot of human labour, but is actually very amenable to automation
- Insurance - InsureTech
Insurance has straightforward minimal mathematics -
- Some loss event
$L$ that requires a payout$C$ as compensation -
$N$ customers all want to insure against$L$ -
$P$ is expected number of payouts per year - If all
$N$ customers pay a premium$\frac{CP}{N}$ each year, all should be well in the long run - As
$N$ grows large - individual premium payments get smaller, estimates of$P$ get more accurate - If total income exceeds payouts, surplus can be invested or returned
- A reserve fund is maintained to cover
$> P$ payouts per year - Insurers buy reinsurers to spread the risk of large payouts
With the rise of VR/AR and mixed-reality - there are some new cases for insurance, and these are covered under InsureTech - KMPG estimates that these risks could cost businesses £20 billion annually
Risks include -
- Human risks
- Physical risks - people becoming disoriented and injuring themselves
- Mental risks - no long-term studies on what the effect of this will be - possible it may affects mental health
- Digital consent - laws and liability are not defined in the "metaverse"
- Data risks
- A range of data will be more susceptible to fraud and malicious acts e.g. biometric data, emotional data
- Underlying legacy systems could be vulnerable to data and cyber breaches
It should be noted that a lot of this is conjecture - we don't yet know what the actual risk is
- Claims - AR/MR headsets to conduct damage assessments
- Talent - help to attract new talent to the claims profession
- Underwriters - technology used to examine assets without needing to be onsite
- Brokers - help with analysing a client's risk profile
- Product developers - new insurance policies for new technologies