The Sudden Entry of Technology in Insurance

The sudden rise in Covid-19 cases have forced insurance companies to adopt technology to improve processes and deliver a seamless customer experience. These companies also anticipate growth in such technology to continue once the health crisis passes.

This sudden growth also known as “insurtech” was driven by the social distancing measures and quarantines that accompanied the pandemic, while adoption of other technologies came despite it. Edin Imsirovic, an associate director at insurance rating firm AM Best, said market pressure from the pandemic advanced innovation by a couple of years or so. “Digitization in the insurance space sort of really accelerated this year due to COVID,” Imsirovic said in an interview.

According to him, this sudden adoption of technology might accurately describe some advances such as communicating virtually with policyholders. Serge Gagarin, manager of segment marketing at catastrophe risk modeling firm AIR Worldwide says “large-scale systems integration projects,” big projects insurers might be undertaking, are developing independently of the pandemic.” Technology growth hasn’t always been a priority in the insurance industry. “We’re a slow industry to adopt things sometimes, I dare say,” said Don Griffin, vice president of personal lines for the American Property Casualty Insurance Association.

This adoption of technology enables companies to seamlessly predict the severity of events and for claims handling. Though the use of the technology has been increasing even before the pandemic, the sudden acceleration happened during quarantines for claims handling, experts say. This modeling gives agents an idea of how strong damage was at a location, said Tom Larsen, principal of industry solutions at CoreLogic. “Weather forensics” determine what happened at a specific location rather than half a mile away.