Ninety’s Insurance Innovation Pulse February 2021 iii Circle

Ninety’s Insurance Innovation Pulse is our monthly round-up of new ideas in the global insurance industry.  We cover headlining innovations, top innovation themes and innovation analysis for the month. Ninety’s Idea Pulse dashboard provides visual indicators of monthly innovation trends by business lines, regions, and Ninety’s innovation taxonomy – the Ten Types of Insurance Innovation.

The data for this report is compiled from officially-announced, ready-to-market innovations reported from leading insurers, reinsurers, and brokers across the world.

Our monthly round-up concludes with a showcase of five case studies of innovations from a cross-section of business lines and innovation themes. For the most part, the case studies chosen are representative examples of commonly recurring themes of the month rather than examples that focus on novel ideas or one-of-a-kind solutions.

February Highlights

• Ninety recorded a total of 53 new ideas and announcements across the globe from insurance businesses, not counting insurtechs.
• Digital platforms, AI/ML-driven risk management and contactless service were among the recurring themes driving innovation this month.
• As in January, new products and lines continue to dominate – although with a wider product mix coming to market this month. Examples include health insurance for small and mid-size businesses, embedded travel insurance, a diverse range of commercial specialty products, custom property insurance and subscription plans, among others.

The Top Innovation Themes in February

Insurance Idea Pulse Dashboard: February  2021

Ninety’s Ten Types of Insurance Innovation

Ninety’s Analysis

• We continue to see predictions of Ninety’s 10 Big Ideas for 2021 being ratified in February. We witnessed an increased focus on AI in underwriting and risk assessment this month – affirming our prediction on Machine Intelligence.
• We also find an acceleration of digital platforms being rolled out for distribution and new business, notably among the largest carriers in commercial, specialty and reinsurance lines. The continuing uncertainty around COVID-19 and the growing mainstreaming of digital models are some of the possible driving forces. The digitalisation imperative was demonstrated with some strategic announcements –Chubb’s entry into digital insurance brands with the launch of “BLINK^SM by Chubb®” and Beazley’s newly formed digital business unit.
• Health insurance was a recurring theme in February. Some insurers made investments in therapy-oriented telehealth platforms, while others expanded telehealth coverage options and added value services for health plans. The commercial business segment was also the target of insurers to cross-sell health insurance and services via digital platforms.
• Reinsurance and P&C lines accounted for more than 85% of ideas launched in February. The small and mid-size business market segment had the maximum focus from insurers this month.
• The US, UK and rest of Europe accounted for 91% of new ideas and announcements in February. Please do consider a research bias related to information availability in English.

What this means for you: a Ninety Partner point of view

• North American carriers should consciously explore the global movement towards sustainability innovation. There is a real danger of being left behind at a moment when the global zeitgeist is hot – we have seen high levels of activity from European and some Asian carriers, but little from North America.
• Life insurers should look to commercial P&C carriers for inspiration. These are a hotbed for innovation just now, and even historic laggards like the Lloyd’s of London market are now innovating complex themes such as intangibles. Consider hiring innovation leaders from specialty P&C into life businesses.
• Insurers of all types should innovate in the People & Structure category. It’s under-weighted, and yet offers some rapid gains. Innovation training, in particular, has been shown to generate impressive results.

Five Innovations That Made Headlines in February

Aon and Chubb Launch Digital Insurance Platform in France for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses.

Aon and Chubb joined forces to launch a new digital platform in France for small and medium-sized businesses. Aon Digital offers more than 10 insurance products from Chubb and reduces the time it takes for a business owner to get insurance from days to minutes.

Aon Digital is powered by CoverWallet, a digital insurance platform that Aon acquired in January 2020. Through the data science and analytics powered platform, businesses can get quotes for multiple products, compare coverage details, pay with a credit card or bank account, instantly download their proof coverage and speak with an insurance specialist if they have any questions throughout the process.

A business owner goes to the online application, answers a few questions about their business, receives instant quotes, and can buy coverage online including Multipro, General Liability and Professional Liability.

Zurich UK will leverage AI-based predictive risk insights in connected cars to improve risk management and enable dynamic insurance solutions.

Last June, Zurich Insurance and Greater Than AB, an AI-based Insurtech provider, launched a dynamic usage-based insurance offering for car-sharing services leveraging Greater Than’s Enerfy AI platform.

This month, the partners have entered into an agreement with Onto, UK’s largest all-inclusive electric car subscription service. Onto’s entire EV fleet is now connected to Greater Than’s Enerfy AI Risk Portfolio Tracker. The EV fleet sends driving data to the Enerfy AI via existing hardware in the cars. At this first stage, the risk-insight will be used by Zurich and Onto to get a better understanding of the fleet’s risk – a springboard to enable the future launch of customer-centric features, such as loyalty programs and rewards.

Per Greater Than AB, their flagship platform Enerfy uses sophisticated Machine Learning algorithms based on Deep Learning layers that the AI understands in real-time and translates to both risk and carbon footprint.

The Enerfy AI has been trained with driving data since 2004 and can identify real-time driving patterns with 99,98% accuracy to factual risk and level of accident probability.

QBE North America launches new product QBE Custom Property^SM – a customizable modular form to deliver individualized risk solutions.

QBE North America launched QBE Custom Property^SM a new product targeted towards the mid-size business segment. The modular property form gives brokers and QBE underwriters the ability to precisely tailor a program for each individual customer. It contains 33 additional coverages, 50 Property endorsements, and 22 Crime endorsements overall.

QBE has designed the product based on feedback from brokers and customers as well as a comprehensive market analysis supported by artificial intelligence from Bold Penguin’s RiskGenius platform.

The product features several risk covers which include a first party Cyber coverage endorsement for business interruption, data recovery and incident response service expenses by cyber incident and crime coverages such as computer fraud and fraudulent fund transfers. Other options include CAT capacity availability, customizable rates on a per-location basis and dependent property coverage.

QBE reports that the Bold Penguin RiskGenius AI platform, which is fully integrated with their systems, facilitated product development. It enabled QBE to compare key policy terms and conditions in the marketplace and drill down to the specific nuances of the coverages available.

 Lockton Re is investing in a portfolio of tools for enhanced cyber risk management.

Lockton Re, the reinsurance arm of global brokerage Lockton has adopted a multiple tool strategy to support risk modelling and catastrophe exposure solutions for cyber risk management, risk assessment and pricing.

Lockton Re licensed two cyber risk solutions in February. The first was insurtech CyberCube’s Portfolio Manager Cyber Analytics Tool that will integrate with Lockton Re’s SAGE proprietary reinsurance analytics platform.  Portfolio Manager is a scenario-based data-driven model that enables risk professionals to develop insights for their senior leadership and teams. It also allows stress testing of portfolios of insurance risk so that loss drivers and areas of accumulation risk can be identified.

Designed to enhance enterprise risk management, Portfolio Manager will allow Lockton Re to advise its clients how their portfolio exposures look for extreme events and guide their reinsurance purchasing options.

Lockton Re simultaneously licensed insurtech Kovrr’s financial cyber risk quantification platform to support cyber risk exposure modelling capability. The Kovrr portfolio exposure management solution utilises a broad set of data sources from multiple cybersecurity vendors, alongside open-source datasets and proprietary data curation engines. The data will be combined with Kovrr’s impact-based proprietary Cyber Catastrophe Modelling Framework. As with CyberCube, the objective is to aid Lockton Re in reinsurance pricing and providing advanced risk diversification insights to their clients.

Swiss Re and Diameter Health to jointly develop the first-ever scalable solution to use electronic clinical health data for life insurance underwriting.

Swiss Re is partnering with health data specialist Diameter Health on a scalable solution that leverages electronic clinical health data for life insurance underwriting. The goal is to solve the bottleneck of accessing an applicant’s health history during the life insurance underwriting process – complicated by the size, variation and disparity of unstructured electronic health records.

Diameter Health is a provider of health data interoperability solutions. Their proprietary Fusion data-refinement technology scrubs and enhances clinical data from any certified EHR to enable intelligent data exchange and integration. Fusion creates a single, longitudinal patient view and enables improved patient care and analytics.

Swiss Re plans to deploy clinical health data across a variety of innovative use cases that will ultimately deliver faster, less expensive and more accurate underwriting and pricing. The joint effort will begin in the US leveraging Swiss Re’s existing suite of Magnum Underwriting Solutions. The enriched data will be ingested and automated via Magnum’s core underwriting rules to expand its functionality and enable more powerful, precise risk assessment.

These are only 5 examples out of 53 that we have collected in February. To buy access to the data reach out to us at ideapulse@ninety.com. For those who want to get more familiar with our Idea Pulse 2021 report and some of themes and ideas we mention, see Idea Pulse 2021 report.