Tag Archives: Internet of Things

LFP088 – Catastrophe, Acts of God & Parametric (Event-Based, Fixed-Payout) Insurance Adam Rimmer FloodFlash

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52% of UK SMEs based floodplains don’t have flood cover! Insurers struggle to insure flood risk due to the difficulty of modelling and assessing the economic impact. Many people/businesses are unable to get insurance cover at all. Every year, globally, there are $50bn of flood caused economic losses of which only $9bn are covered by insurance.

Into the breach (geddit?) step Floodflash formed by Adam Rimmer and Ian Bartholomew experts in modelling event risks – together with the important fixed-payout insurance concept (doesn’t need much reflection to see how good that could be) this constitutes parametric insurance.

Floodflash is an Insuretech startup with great potential.  Its also an opportunity to hear from a firm in the FCA sandbox.

Parametric insurance sounds very techie but in its best known form – life insurance – has been around for centuries.

The market failure above is huge.

On this show we discuss the role of event-based, no-exclusion, instant settlement in addressing this problem. Many people/businesses simply cannot get insurance at present.

Topics discussed on the show include: Continue reading →

LFP084 Insuretech – Using the Internet of Things to Protect your Home with Matt Poll CEO Neos

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The so-called Internet of Things is much hyped and early examples (smart toasters anyone?) are worthy of ridicule. However market-leading Neos have taken it to the next level – using insurance, your phone and devices installed in your home to protect you against fire, water and burglary – or at least notify you and then get their servicers to fix the problem – even when you are on the other side of the world.

If like me you had never heard of smart doorbells and smart valves – or if you have – this is a podcast for you.

Matt Poll was a 20yr insurance man, latterly running More Than at RSA until he joined the world of startups and founded Neos.

In this show we dive beneath the froth and the hype to find out how you can sleep easier when on holiday, or simply in the office and why the Internet of Things is becoming a reality available to us all now.

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LFP074 – Will Reinsurance as a Service Change InsureTech? Andy Rear, CEO Munich Re:Digital Partners

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Can InsureTech change the landscape of insurance as a whole or will it just enhance parts of the value chain? Conventional wisdom says the latter but the appearance of a model called “Reinsurance as a Service” [HT to Daily Fintech] could have far wider repercussions.

Traditionally insurance (in all its very diverse/speciated forms) is in three layers. Brokers. Insurers and Reinsurers. Traditionally you would deal with a broker. They would get the policy from a an insurer (eg Aviva who we had on the show in LFP048). Insurers in turn would re-insure themselves with aptly named – er – Reinsurers.

We’ll talk about how Reinsurance as a Service might change that “stack”.

Andy is the CEO of Digital Partners, Munich Re’s entity for interfacing between it and the Insuretech world. MunichRe is one of the worlds largest reinsurers. To give you an idea of what that means it has around 43k employees, €50bn of revenues and €276bn of assets.

Incumbents across FS are trying all sorts of approaches to the Fintech phenomenon. Judging by results to date Munich Re have found one of the best avenues. In a relatively short time they have established partnerships with a number of InsureTechs, none of them “tangential”, including Bought by Many (stars of LFP027), Blink Innovation, Next Insurance, Simplesurance, Slice, So-sure, Trov, Wrisk.

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LFP022 – 30,000 Feet Overview of Payments with Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion

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Having done a few Alternative Finance shows recently it’s important to recall that there is another hardcore Fintech sector that is already changing the world (as opposed to threatening to in the future). This is payments.

One quarter of the Fintech50 are payments companies and when I looked a little while ago there were well over a thousand on Angelslist. So we definitely need a super sherpa to guide us through this landscape.

Consult Hyperion are an independent technical and strategic consultancy that specialises in secure electronic transactions. For two decades they have been working with technologies ranging from smart cards and mobile phones to contactless tickets and electronic ID in mass-market systems that include global payments, national and regional ticketing, international settlement, national identity and corporate  services.

So I think they might know a bit 🙂

Dave – besides being a member of the Amalgamated Union of Wheeltappers, Shunters and Podcasters was a founding director of the Consult Hyperion, is now their global ambassador and has decades of experience under his belt.

A very rich show with plenty about what is really going on with payments – especially from the strategic big picture perspective which certainly helps put the semi-infinite number of payments startups into some kind of context.

Topics discussed include: Continue reading →