Industry ‘needs to reinvent the wheel’
The re/insurance industry needs to reinvent the wheel by deploying technologies that can reshape the manner or processes by which business is done, instead of improving on existing processes.
This is the opinion of Ori Karev, president of United Re, a healthcare reinsurance facilitator.
He added that while there is clearly an attempt to make use of new technologies to improve their current processes, we are not seeing new ways of handling the reinsurance business.
Karev will be speaking on “Innovation and big data in the insurance industry” at a panel during the FIDES conference on Monday, November 13.
“If I can figure out the time it takes a car to come and pick you up (Gett/Uber) or the best route to drive somewhere, we can certainly think of ways to reach data in real time and eliminate barriers of access, availability, transparency and management which were put in place many years ago and are still governing the business today,” he claimed.
Karev believes that Latin America can “leap frog” to big data, algorithms and predictive modelling, without having to spend the time it took for Europe of the US to get there.
“Deploying these technologies will drive productivity and efficiency up, which in turn will make the system more affordable to the growing middle class,” he added.
For Karev, the question is not whether the reinsurance market is stuck in the past, but how can the insurance/reinsurance interplay benefit from adopting and adapting to existing big data and analytics technologies, and how can such benefits translate to a more efficient market with better results and offerings to all parties involved.
He also believes that regulators understand the benefits that can be derived from better and up-to-date knowledge, from the points of view of transparency, predictability and compliance.
“Since insurance is characterised by voluminous data and decision-making processes, it is only natural that 2018 will be the year when innovative disruptions reach our industry.”
Next year will also be interesting for United Re: the company will raise funds to promote its “disruptive model” within the South and Central American insurance and reinsurance marketplace.
United Re (formerly Iror Advisors) was formed in 2010 “to bring a disruptive new model to the world of global reinsurance”.
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