Reflections from the Digital Insurance Agenda, Amsterdam

Earlier this month Craig Beattie and I ventured off to Amsterdam to attend the Digital Insurance Agenda (DIA), where we also delivered a keynote. This was the event’s second year and, within just 12 months, it has grown significantly to around 850 people - attracting insurers, innovative technology players (from both the establishment and budding entrepreneurs), and investors from across Europe and beyond. The format is a sprightly mix of keynote presentations, panels, and live demonstrations. And, like last year, it was another great mix of people and ideas, each focused on driving change in customer engagement across the industry through technology.

(Venue: Gashouder at the Westergasfabriek. An impressive venue - with Celent on stage somewhere up there at the front :-))

Key take-aways for me were:

• Distribution and front-end engagement remains a strong area of focus for innovation. However, unlike recent history where investment has been heavily channelled into mobile or touch-enabled browser experiences, the presence of chat and other app-less modes of interaction were strongly evidenced throughout most of the live demos. This has been a hot trend over the last 12 months, and where Celent has explored both insurer and consumer attitudes towards it (see Celent report: Applying Conversational Commerce to Insurance: Aligning IT to the Machine World). Given the issues that many insurers have had with trying to encourage customers to download their apps and engage with them through them, it’s not hard to see why 'smart chat' is being pursued so aggressively.
  
• Heavier focus on the use of data for risk profiling and the application of emerging AI techniques (beyond chat use-cases). Personally, I find it incredible just how low the entry barriers have become for experimenting with data and AI. The perfect storm of huge compute power via the cloud, open-source and pay-per-use models for advanced technology enables those with relatively modest means and a great idea to get started. For me, this continues to be one of the most interesting areas in our industry for mining value. It’s also an area that insurers still find a challenge (see Celent report: Tackling the Big Data Challenges in Global Insurance: Differences Across Continents and Use Cases).
  
• Celent has been tracking the development of innovation partnerships across the industry for a number of years (see Celent report: Insurer-Startup Partnerships: How to Maximize Insurtech Investments). At DIA, it was easy to see this in action. The vast majority of firms presenting were not a direct threat to the industry at large, but instead were exemplars of better ways of doing things through the use of smart technology. It’s not hard to envision that a few of the firms demonstrating at DIA will walk straight into pilots following the event.

The event was closed with a keynote from Scott Walcheck of Trov. Scott shared openly some of the progress that they have been making – which, to me, feels impressive. For example, they now have ~60-70 engineers working on the team and claim to be growing revenue by ~44% month-on-month (albeit from a starting position of zero).

Out of all of the insurtech start-up activity globally, there are just a handful of firms (in my opinion) who have the potential to really shake things up – and Trov is one of these. They now have the capital, the engineering capacity and the partnerships to do some truly incredible things - if they choose to.

I also found it interesting to hear that they have started to evolve their business model into three focus areas, being: (1) Trov as a direct brand; (2) White-labelled Trov; and (3) Insurance-as-a-service, where they will rent their platform to partners - plus with an aspiration to evolve it into auto, home and other lines. Given Celent’s focus on technology research across the industry, this last model-type is of keen interest. Trov’s engineering capacity is already a similar size to (and in some cases larger than) many mid-to-small insurance carriers. It is also larger than some of the traditional independent solution technology providers out there. Could they be the next big technology player on the scene in addition to their existing branded business? Only time will tell, but it is clear they are already demonstrating how insurtech represents a new way of delivering insurance product development.

For more commentary on DIA, see Craig Beattie’s Moments on Twitter. Also, keep checking the DIA website as they will shortly release some of the videos from the event.