🥕Carrot InsurTech doubles its capital through $90 million rights offering
Plus, Indian Fintech Startup Aims to Win Insurance Clients with Fresh $200M Funding Round 🔎
🥕 Carrot InsurTech doubles its capital through $90 million rights offering. Carrot, South Korea's first digital-only non-life insurer, is driving rapid growth in auto insurance by their proprietary driving data analytics and vehicular/IoT device application. With a large influx of subscribers, customers are taking a liking to Carrot's fresh concept of pay-per-mile and pay-how-you-drive auto coverage. (Read More)
Sankar Virdhagriswaran, Partner @IBM:
“Lifestyle-based microinsurance is one of the major trends in the optional insurance acquired market, compared to the mandated insurance market (such as auto insurance). IBM has worked with several insurers on similar ideas in P&C, Life, and Group Benefits areas since 2005 at the inception of Watson-led, AI-driven transformation. Carrot appears to have figured out a way to do this.
To classify and manage risk changes fundamentally, insurers need data, analytics, and predictive algorithms to serve this new need. Today, Experience data around product and pricing are typically collected, aggregated, and analyzed at the annual level. However, microinsurers will have to change how they measure risk to target certain aspects of a lifestyle activity.
Due to the interaction between lifestyle microinsurance and other insurance types, adoption rates will vary across populations and cultures. Additionally, lifestyle microinsurance can have different adoption curves in commercial insurance, with some professional and general liability insurance markets being substantially affected. Insurers need to pay attention and start fixing their technology, applications, data, analytics, and AI gaps to participate in this market.”
📲 Indian Fintech Startup Aims to Win Insurance Clients with Fresh $200M Funding Round. Indian fintech startup Digit just had one of the largest funding rounds in the fast-growing Indian insurance market. Digit aims to expand its Indian base by facilitating buying coverage, submitting claims, and receiving payments. To achieve this, Digit offers smartphone-enabled self-inspection, voice claim submissions, and text message-based service requests. (Read More)
Jessica Chiu, Associate Partner @IBM:
“As legacy insurers seek to modernize siloed capabilities across channels and Lines of Business, InsurTechs enjoy an advantage of "building omnichannel, first." Digit, and other startups, have seized an opportunity to take a user-centric approach towards designing seamless experiences for critical interaction intents. This is an especially important advantage in India's developing market.”
🔎 Best’s Insurance Law Podcast Discusses How New Technology is Changing Marine Loss Claims. This episode explores the impact the latest technologies have on the different types of marine loss claims, including total loss, actual loss, constructive loss, and the corresponding risks. (Listen Here)
Annap Derebail, Global Insurance Industry CTO @IBM:
“Technologies, such as LIDAR-based drones and underwater lasers, are seeing increased adoption to automate and accelerate the resolution of marine claims. In what has been historically a very manually-driven process, these developments are exciting. It also presents interesting opportunities, such as cloud-delivered and edge-based analytical processing, to optimize claims processing to lower costs, shorten processing times and reduce costs.”
🚗 JVP Leads $35M Financing Round in Global Insurtech Firm Inshur. Founded in New York and initially setting out to transform rideshare insurance for New York's Uber drivers, INSHUR is expanding to new markets and with new products for delivery and courier drivers. Customers can now simply scan their professional license through the INSHUR app, which automatically processes and retrieves relevant pricing data, allowing drivers to get their insurance coverage in just minutes, as opposed to waiting days to start driving and start earning. (Read More)
Yoann Michaux, Senior Partner @IBM:
“This is another example illustrating the winning recipe of a faster, simpler, more intuitive, and instant customer experience (scan your professional license). INSHUR is catering to micro and small businesses requiring flexibility and convenience, whether as their primary or secondary activity, fueled by rich first and third-party data, to both streamline the intake and better understand the risk and pricing.
INSHUR's focus is clearly stated on the gig economy, drivers, and self-employed/business owners. However, the same ingredients apply across all, or most, segments and present the opportunity to reinvent an experience up front as well as re-imagine all underlying functions by transforming them into extended intelligent workflows, leveraging both external and internal processes.”
Contributors:
Yoann Michaux — yoann.michaux@ibm.com
Stephanie Marino — stephanie.marino@ibm.com
Mikey Mayers — michael.mayers@ibm.com
Hugo Almeida — hugo.almeida@ibm.com
Vincent Chenneveau — vincent.chenneveau@ibm.com
Sankar Virdhagriswaran — svirdhagriswaran@us.ibm.com
Jessica Chiu — Jessica.Chiu@ibm.com
Annap Derebail — annap@us.ibm.com
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