Our thoughts

Game-changer? The term is often bandied about but almost as often reality fails to match expectation. But this time the game could be about to change – read on. Modern consumers looking to buy insurance are sure to check out the Internet. A good place to start might be a comparison site where one can get quotes from multiple insurers and then buy on line. The process for, say, motor insurance can take less than 15 minutes – although one might want to spend a bit longer reviewing the options and confirming one’s choice. However, if the modern consumer then…

‘Big data’ is still a buzzword but if data isn’t on your radar it ought to be. In our digital world, data is key to running a successful business, especially if you deal with individual consumers. Indeed, some firms make data their business, acquiring it, analyzing it, interpreting it and selling it to your business – and maybe helping you apply it to what you do. Twitter’s core activity is generating and selling useful data. It just happens that people use it to communicate using 140 characters or less. Google is an excellent search engine but also it knows a…

A session on claims at the Canadian Reinsurance Conference held in Toronto earlier this year was a neat reminder of the technology gap between underwriting and claims. Increasingly underwriting is underpinned by technology. E-apps and underwriting engines combine a speedy, efficient process with the generation of valuable management information. Claims, on the other hand, still involve a lot of paper and relatively little support by systems. David Nicolai of Fineos reported research showing that most carriers do not have integrated solutions that support the whole of the claim process. What systems there are tend to facilitate only part of the…

Earlier this year a major UK tour operator was ‘forcibly’ repatriating customers who had been enjoying a vacation in Kenya and cancelling all scheduled vacations to the area until 31 October. This was in response to a ‘travel advisory’ from the UK government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office relating to a high threat of terrorist action by the Muslim extremist group Al-Shabaab. There is maybe a question mark over whether the company should have given is customers the option of staying until their original date of return, but one can understand that such terrorism alerts do land a tour operator in…

We underwriters tend not to look back too much at how the outlook for the various medical conditions we deal with has changed over the years.

There is sustained interest in underwriting engines, and rightly so because they are in many ways the future of underwriting. Not entirely, for there are and will continue to be risks and situations that engines cannot handle, but automation is the way the game is headed, not just in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and increasingly North America but in parts of South-East Asia too. Continental Europe remains a bit of a curiosity in that deployment of engines has been a bit patchy, certainly for life insurance, although much health insurance business is auto-underwritten in Germany. Even in…

These days, admitting you’re a smoker is like it would have been declaring you’re gay 15 years ago. People almost recoil, wonder how you could do that and say to their friends that they always had their suspicions anyway. However, now a smoker can become less of a pariah by switching to electronic (e-) cigarettes – demonstrating that almost everything is ‘e’ these days (or maybe ‘i’ if you are of the Apple persuasion). Apparently these may also be referred to as ‘electronic vaping devices’, ‘personal vaporizers’ (PVs), or ‘electronic nicotine delivery systems’ (ENDS). We’ll just refer to them as…

The publication of the fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – usually referred to simply as ‘the DSM’ – is due round about the time you receive this edition of Underwriter e-Alert. (We’re naturally pleased but it may be only coincidence at work.) This mighty reference work from the American Psychiatric Association is not just the ‘bible’ by which psychiatric conditions are classified and diagnosed; the DSM is used the world over by researchers, drug regulation agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and policy makers – and by insurance companies, especially health insurers. Compared with DSM-IV, edition V…

This was the title of an interesting conference that took place in London in 2013. While it was focused on the UK, a number of the issues addressed are pertinent across the globe. So what is the future of the protection market – that is, primarily the market for term life? Or, possibly more fundamentally, does the protection market have a future? There was lot of discussion around the so called ‘protection gap’. This is the vast difference between the total face amount nationally of theoretically adequate levels of protection coverage and what is actually in place. Swiss Re estimates…

Several of the sessions at the ICLAM meeting at the end of May 2013 in Madrid dealt with predicting cardiovascular risk. The ECG, and especially the resting trace, is a pathetically weak tool alongside the heavyweight imaging techniques – but at least it’s cheap. Of modern, sophisticated tools like the stress echo, stress single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), stress MRI and CT coronary angiography, it is apparently the last-mentioned that is the most powerful in identifying lesions and thus predicting risk. But we should not forget coronary calcium scoring, carotid artery 3D ultrasound scanning and 2D carotid scanning to determine…