Singapore

The “wait and see” attitude is holding back insurers from being early adopters of digital transformation.

The Asian mass affluent consumer is expected to hold $43.3t in assets by 2020, and Goldberg eyes leveraging this opportunity.

When a top insurance company in the US found that its customers seeking an online insurance quote were finding it tedious to fill out numerous forms, it deployed Amelia.

Coface named Samuel Jesuratnam as country manager for Singapore effective September 2017.

If regulatory and macroeconomic risk were foremost amongst insurer worries two years ago, these have now been overtaken by anxieties on coping with change and cyber risk. Change management has shot up to the top of the bi-annual 2017 Banana Skins survey, which reflects risk perception amongst insurers globally in the next two to three years, up from sixth place in the 2015 rankings. Similarly, cyber risk has risen to become the second most critical concern for insurers, up from fourth, due to the rising threat of cyberattacks and the steep costs of underwriting cybercrime.

China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India are the most promising economies.

Despite significant investments made insurance innovation labs have largely failed to deliver impact beyond positive initial PR stories. Why is that the case and how can it be fixed? Recent years has seen insurance industry leaders globally waking up to reality that the dream of industry being insulated from the digital revolution sweeping across many other industries was just that, a dream. With a heavy baggage of legacy IT systems and rigid corporate cultures, incumbents found themselves in a tough situation. What’s the best way to prepare for upcoming disruption without meantime hurting your existing business. Innovation labs appeared, at least initially, like a perfect answer. In-house innovation that brings the right ingredients to allow for a safe digital experimentation without causing disruption to the existing businesses. The expectation was that innovation labs would become a quasi-startups that would allow insurers to build digital and innovation capabilities to safeguard against the coming digital disruption.

Disruption is shaking the fundamentals of the insurance industry. This is true structural change, not just a cycle. New technologies, new competitors, new markets, new regulations, and changing consumer behaviours are all creating tremendous opportunities, and posing significant risk to the legacy insurance business model. To succeed in this dynamic environment, organisations are reevaluating their portfolio of business and rationalising their global footprint to strategically determine “where to play” and “how to win” in the future. One of the immediate consequences of this trend is the expected rise in deal activity in the global insurance industry.

From tracking drivers’ braking behaviour, to installing wearable devices on factory workers, to funding medical advice mobile apps, many insurance companies are trying to become more present in their customers’ lives. They know that earning greater loyalty will require interacting more with their customers and delivering more value as well. Insurers are finally paying attention to this customer-centric approach as an alternative to the traditional internal focus on products, agents, and in-year financial considerations.

The Office of the Commissioner of Insurance in Hong Kong will be replaced by the Independent Insurance Authority from June 26 . What changes can the insurance industry expect?

Teow eyes bridging the US$330b protection gap and increasing collaborations amongst stakeholders.

With rapid and revolutionary transformations in business-customer interaction across the globe, private customer data is now considered the insurer’s digital goldmine. Asian insurers, traditional they may be, are finally catching up to the analytics game. Enhanced online customer engagement is slowly eliminating countless piles of feedback forms as businesses make it their primary aim to digitally collect and manage private and precious customer data.

In the year 2016, satisfaction amongst risk and life insurance policy holders was 67.4%, down from 68.8% in 2015, and still lower than that of all other major insurance types. Less than one in four (23.9%) risk and life policyholders were “very satisfied” with their insurance companies. These are the latest findings from Roy Morgan’s Single Source survey of over 50,000 consumers, which includes detailed coverage of over 9,000 risk and life insurance policy holders.

If property & casualty (P&C) insurers want to dominate the industry in the coming years, then part of their game plan should involve becoming a trailblazer in digital technology. Bain & Company believes a billion-dollar opportunity exists in digital innovations, but only firms that lead the pack will likely reap the full benefits while laggards will be left to pick up the crumbs.

The world was devastated by 327 disasters in 2016, 191 of which were natural catastrophes and 136 man-made ones. According to a recent report by Swiss Re, economic losses from these disasters totalled US$175b, almost double the level in 2015. Asia’s economic losses of US$83b in 2016 was the highest in the world.

Are wearables the closest thing to drones in the insurance sector?