Disrupting InsurTech: A Breakdown On Startup Driven Innovation

One function of the increasingly high customer expectations related to advances in the FinTech industry has been the emergence of ‘InsurTech’. As the name suggests, InsurTech is focused on innovation in the insurance industry in connection with the giant strides made in FinTech. The insurance industry is presently experiencing as much disruption as other sectors. For example, significant advances in products like wearables and autonomous cars, and the revolution induced by the Internet of Things (IoT), are important reasons the insurance industry has been forced to step up its pace. Insurance companies seeking to innovate amid technological disruption will be compelled to pay close attention to the IoT, with its likely potential to completely overhaul their business models. The IoT brings to the table a multitude of new data sources that insurers can make use of to better understand risk and satisfy new types of demand coming from clients, potentially leading to new types of insurance. As IoT, together with Artificial Intelligence, accounted for EUR 636 million in InsurTech funding globally in 2016 (almost half of the total global funding in InsurTech), there are a number of clear examples of disruptive technologies changing the insurance landscape.

As cutting-edge startups and their technology are the driver of disruption, we put them in the spotlight. At StartUs Insights, our unit dedicated to Innovation Scouting and Open Innovation, we run an extensive analysis on 14.000 startups, discovering several innovation areas which will impact the insurance industry in the near future. To shed light on the application and potential of the most disruptive of these emerging technologies, we decided to outline the most dominant innovation areas. As our focus lies on introducing leading-edge startups, we provide one example for each innovation area to highlight existing cooperation potential.