Ethos Picks Up $100M for a Big Data Platform to Improve Life Insurance Accessibility – Tech Crunch
“Ethos uses more than 300,000 data points online to determine a person’s eligibility for life insurance policies, which are offered as either term or whole life packages starting at $8/month. This latest injection of funding will be used to hire more people and continue to expand its product set into adjacent areas of insurance like critical illness coverage. Much like companies in fintech that have rethought how loan applications (and payback terms) can be rethought and evaluated afresh using big data — pulling in a new range of information to form a picture of the applicant and the likelihood of default or not — Ethos is among the companies that is applying that same concept to a different problem. The end result is a much faster turnaround for applications, a considerably cheaper and more flexible offer (term life insurance lasts only as long as a person pays for it), and generally a lot more accessibility for everyone potentially interested. That pool of data is growing all the time. There are also insurtechs like YuLife and Sproutt looking at how to emphasize the “life” aspect of life insurance. Others like DeadHappy and BIMA are, like Ethos, rethinking accessibility of life insurance for a wider set of demographics.”
Artificial Intelligence
Voice Is Becoming a Primary Search Technology – ComputerWorld
“More than 30% of us now use voice assistants daily, and around 23% of us use them several times a day. Nearly everyone is aware that these things exist… Among those who don’t yet use voice assistants, 42% said concerns about privacy have stopped them doing so, while 32% just don’t trust the assistants… The report states that most of us use Siri and the other assistants to control music (73% of users) and check the weather (80% of users), and confirms 91% of users have searched using voice.”
Insurers Won’t Save a Heating World From Floods and Fire – Bloomberg
As the frequency and severity of small-scale disasters increase, reinsurers are having to pay more attention. Swiss Re AG, the world’s largest natural catastrophe reinsurer, said last year it had started paring back parts of its portfolio with high exposure to secondary perils, and is raising its modeled risks associated with weather events in Australia, typhoons in Japan and wildfires in California. That will increase the costs of coverage for primary insurers and customers down the chain. Climate change makes all these problems more difficult. Insurers’ models for the cost of natural disasters are based on historical data, but those trends are shifting in unpredictable ways as the climate warms. All that is going to lead to increased premium costs, exclusions and deductibles.
Chubb Survey Finds Consumer Behaviors Toward Cyber Security Remain Unchanged Despite Increasing Risk – PR Newswire
According to Chubb's Fourth Cyber Report, which examined individuals' new cyber exposures, comprehension of cyber risks, and preventative actions taken, more than two-thirds of Americans report that they have become somewhat or much more concerned about the potential for a cyber breach in the past year; however, a third of respondents have not taken any preventative actions to protect themselves or their data. These figures remain relatively unchanged from 2019.