This March, The Fintech Times is shifting its spotlight towards insurtech, such as how advanced data analysis is driving efficiencies across the insurance sector.

From enhancing risk assessment accuracy to personalising products and services, insurers are leveraging data analytics to optimise decision-making processes, mitigate risks and cater to evolving consumer needs.

Industry experts share insights into the pivotal role of data in reshaping insurance operations and strategies worldwide.

Huge impact

Data analysis, particularly predictive analytics, have made major strides to improving risk assessment in insurance, says Ashleigh Gwilliam, director of insurance industry growth at customer lifecycle intelligence platform FullCircl.

“Vast amounts of information can be analysed allowing for more accurate pricing, individualisation of policies and mitigation of future losses.

“Algorithmic analysis is also having a huge impact on actuarial departments, identifying hidden trends in data that can uncover the real reasons for claims, advanced analytics can also identify key trigger moments when a claim is likely.

“Fraudulent claims are a key concern for every insurance company. Data analytics can improve detection rates – analysing documents and information for areas of potential miss-representation and inaccuracy – whilst ensuring claims are paid quickly and cost effectively.

“In BIBA’s 2024 Manifesto, it encourages brokers to “meet the needs of the modern economy” and “respond to emerging risks”. Advanced data analytics will have an increasingly important role in modern insurance decision, identifying trends and customer needs and driving innovation in products and services.”

Streamlining workflows

Rajeev Gupta, co-founder and chief product officer of Cowbell, an adaptive cyber insurance company, suggests that advanced data analytics, particularly in cyber risk assessment, enables businesses to gain clarity, simplify processes and improve efficiency and accuracy.

“Data analytics is not new to insurance. Actuaries have been analysing data for pricing and claims reserving for decades. However, the landscape has evolved lately, with advanced data analytics now used by insurers in all other areas of the business – from risk assessment and fraud detection to improving operational efficiency and even refining product roadmap.

“At Cowbell, we are actively assessing the cyber risk posture of over 39 million businesses in the US and the UK. With our rich data pool, we enable businesses to gain clarity about their cyber risk posture in relation to their industry peers in just minutes, while also simplifying and expediting the quoting process for agents, and making the underwriting process more objective.

“By automating processes and streamlining workflows, they are able to reduce costs, improve speed, and increase accuracy across various workflows.”

Improved efficiency

AI-driven tools are enabling personalised quoting, dynamic policy management and streamlined claims processing, according to Scott Logie, chief commercial officer at independent UK consultancy.

“Data analytics, particularly tools underpinned by AI, is powering more efficient, intelligent decision-making across the insurance pipeline and customer lifecycle.

“At the beginning of customers’ journeys, analytics is making quotes generation more personalised. Historically, insurers grouped customers into broad segments based on basic profiles. Now, machine learning models enable more datapoints to be analysed, creating accurate risk profiles for designing bespoke offers. We see this technology in action on comparison sites, which are underpinned by models trained on existing quotes for age, location, house type, and car make or model.

“Analytics is also used by insurers to manage ongoing policies. AI tools review customer data and suggest edits to premiums when a customer’s situation changes. For example, moving into a higher risk area or buying a more expensive car.

“Finally, AI is making claims decisions more efficient. Often, the basics around who, why, when and what are now dealt with automatically based on machine learning models trained on past claims. With fewer manual tasks, insurance advisors and experts can dedicate more time to complex cases and tasks that bring more value to the business.”

Better policy decisions

For Sarah Carver, head of retail banking, wealth and insurance at global financial services provider Delta Capita, insurers can make better, more informed decisions, optimise their internal processes and create value for both the business and the end customers by leveraging advanced data analysis.

“We see particular value driven in three key areas:

• Risk: Insurers can use advanced data analysis to both evaluate risk and then personalise risk assessments using both historical data and predictive scenario based modelling to predict future behaviour. This can also be meshed with individual behaviour patterns allowing for an enhanced risk picture and better policy decisions.
• Customer insights and servicing: Data-driven insights can help insurers understand customer preferences, behaviours, and needs better leading to much better servicing of these customers whether on a micro level of individual servicing or on a macro level to future product development and marketing strategies. Advanced data analysis can also help identify and prevent fraud before it occurs saving cost and retaining customer trust.
• Efficiency and precision: Whether in processing claims more efficiently through analysis to determine where time should be spent, setting precise pricing by using better data to offer both competitive pricing but also less generic ‘one size fits all’ approaches.”

Getting ahead

Alex Littlejohn, executive VP at US insurance brokerage Alliant Retail P&C, says that with the insurance industry’s increasing ability to understand analytics and uses for collected data, analytics are taking on a larger role in how underwriters review, charge and provide capacity on insurance programmes, in addition to leveraging claims analytics to understand how losses impact coverages.

“Assessments conducted based on insureds’ data affects how the insurance community rates and evaluates risks.

“From an insured perspective, analytics allow them to get ahead of underwriters’ decisions, enabling decision-making on limits and deductibles for programme optimisation, both prior to shopping the insurance market and then evaluating conditions they receive back from the market.

“We’ll always move forward in terms of how data and analytics impact decision-making, both in how clients decide to buy risk and mitigate their risk, and how insurance companies decide to provide capacity and charge for the risk.”

Better price risk

Insurance companies worldwide are adopting AI to understand better how insureds drive, says Rashid Galadanci, CEO and co-founder of Driver Technologies, an AI-based mobility tech company

“Specifically leveraging video telematics-based scoring, insurance companies can now underwrite and classify the risk based on how an individual, or even a whole fleet, really drives instead of traditional factors like credit scores or motion-only telematics, which miss critical factors like tailgating and traffic sign adherence.

“Telematics with video analysis is also incredibly valuable for the claims process for users as visual ground truth cuts substantial time and costs from the claims lifecycle and, in many cases, can eliminate any need for arbitration.

“Additionally, to assess and design safer communities, we must understand our current road infrastructure by studying anonymous road safety and road risk information to develop insights into the types of improvements we need.

“By analysing real-world, location-specific road risks derived from regular and image-based road segment data (RSD) using telematics and computer vision data, insurance companies can better price risk while educating their insureds with insights into the most dangerous intersections and best roadways to keep them safe.”

Better predictions

David Bairstow, chief product officer at EagleView, a provider of aerial insights for insurance companies in the US, underscores the critical role of data and analytics in helping insurers address significant challenges such as talent retention, increasing population density in disaster-prone areas, and economic pressures.

“The insurance industry is facing significant challenges. Employees with deep experience are retiring. Attracting new talent is proving difficult. Externally, more people now reside in areas often affected by severe events, increasing pressure on insurers to more effectively underwrite those property risks.

“Further, large-scale events also present challenges in effectively servicing insureds after such events occur. And recent inflationary trends continue to damage insurer economics.

“To stay competitive, carriers will need to use data and analytics to pro-actively assess climate risk and model property portfolio exposure. Being able to better predict catastrophic impact and forecast maximum exposure value – before events even occur – will help insurers manage their underwriting and pricing strategies.

“In the aftermath of large-scale events, property intelligence and analytics can be critical tools to help insurers better service their customers. For example, leveraging timely, high-resolution aerial imagery captured at scale across affected areas can help insurers to begin processing claims much faster and, in many cases, before First Notice of Loss (FNOL) is even filed by the insureds.

“Innovative data, analytics, and technology approaches like these will help insurers better serve their customers while also helping improve the structure and financial performance of the carriers’ property insurance portfolios.”

Improving accuracy

James Harrison, global head of insurance at Dun & Bradstreet, a business intelligence and data company.

“In today’s insurance landscape, the power of data analytics cannot be overstated. Advanced data analysis techniques are revolutionising how insurers assess risk, price policies, and make strategic decisions within the industry.

“One primary way data analysis is reshaping the insurance sector is through improving the accuracy of risk assessment. By leveraging vast amounts of data from multiple sources, insurers are better positioned to conduct real-time risk analysis for individual and systemic risks, which leads to precise underwriting decisions and reduced exposure to losses in a volatile risk environment.

“Moreover, data analytics enables insurers to personalise products and services to meet the evolving needs of customers. By analysing data like customer demographics, behaviour and preferences, lifestyle habits; insurers can tailor offerings, pricing, and coverage options according to the consumers; thus enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

“Data analytics is empowering the insurance industry by utilising data-driven decision-making to optimise the entire value chain. In a competitive landscape today, insurers who embrace these technologies and leverage the power of data will not only simply survive but also set a precedent for a new era of more customer centric innovation.”

The intricate web of international transactions, coupled with exorbitant fees and constantly updating regulatory requirements, poses a significant threat to operational efficiency and profitability.

Sam Coyne, CMO Europe at Currenxie, has spent a decade in Asia in B2B technology companies in a variety of sectors, and has held regional and global roles.

Here, he provides insights on cost-effective cross-border payment strategies for businesses.

Accelerating and reducing the cost of cross-border payments is a critical concern for any business operating in the international arena. The complexities of international transactions, with their associated fees and regulatory hurdles, can significantly impact your company’s efficiency and bottom line.

Fortunately, there are strategies you can employ to streamline and economise your cross-border payment processes, ensuring they remain competitive and agile in the global marketplace.

• Embrace fintech solutions

Many fintech companies offer specialised platforms that bypass traditional banking systems, which are often laden with high fees and slow processing times. Offering a faster and more cost-effective solution, fintech solutions deliver secure, direct, and efficient cross-border payments. These platforms not only reduce transaction costs but also minimise the time it takes to settle payments, enabling businesses to operate more fluidly across borders.

It may sound simple, but by combining multiple transactions into a single payment can reduce per-transaction fees and simplify the payment process. This is particularly effective for companies that make regular payments to the same recipients, such as suppliers or subsidiaries in the same country.

• Maintain local currency accounts

Holding accounts in the currencies of key markets can help avoid conversion fees and losses. This strategy allows businesses to pay and receive money in the local currency, reducing the need for multiple conversions and enhancing the efficiency in managing international cash flows.

• Adopt multi-currency platforms

Platforms that support transactions in multiple currencies without the need for conversion to a base currency can offer significant savings. These systems allow for businesses to manage funds in various currencies more effectively, reducing exchange losses and conversion fees.

• Implement hedging strategies

Protect against currency volatility by implementing proper controls for currency risk management. For example, hedging instruments like forward contracts, futures and options can help lock in exchange rates for future transactions, providing predictability in costs and protecting against adverse movement in currency values.

• Diversify currency holdings

Maintaining balances in multiple currencies can also allow companies to use funds more efficiently for cross-border payments, reducing the need for constant currency conversion and the associated fees.

• Centralise payment operations

By centralising payment operations, you can gain better control over your international transactions, allowing for more efficient management of funds and reduction in administrative overhead.

• Stay informed on regulatory changes

The regulatory landscape for cross-border payments is constantly evolving. Staying informed about changes in regulations across different countries can help your business avoid delays, fines, and additional costs. Understanding these regulations can also assist in more effective compliance management, ensuring smoother transactional operations.

• Simplify your global payment operations

By strategically adopting these methods, you can significantly enhance efficiency and reduce the costs associated with cross-border payments. The key lies in embracing advanced solutions with companies like Currenxie, a leading fintech company that makes global payments simple for businesses, providing everything needed to collect, exchange, and send money worldwide.

Today, thousands of businesses trust us to collect and transfer billions of dollars worldwide every year, all while boosting their profits and saving time. Enterprises and and financial providers can also access Currenxie’s payment network via our Platform APIs to collect, exchange, and payout around the world at scale.

For businesses seeking a simple all-in-one solution, our Global Account offers an effortless web and mobile app that gives you access to worldwide virtual accounts, foreign exchange, and bank transfers.

Lastly, while most payment companies sit on top of white-labelled software and rented access to payment rails, Currenxie’s unique and proprietary financial platform delivers the ability for businesses to quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively manage global, multi-currency payments.

One account, global reach: Offering a unified platform and network, you can send and manage cross-border payments from a single, multi-currency platform. Available in all major markets and currencies, Currenxie’s vast network means you have an account everywhere.

Competitive real-time FX: Leveraging Currenxie’s leading FX solutions, you can cut the cost of doing business overseas with transparent pricing and wholesale foreign exchange. With real-time spot-trades at mid-market rates, you’ll always have the price-competitive edge.

Fast and simple transfers: Cross-border payments don’t have to be complicated. Simplify your stack to send and receive payments quickly – where and when you need. Accept and hold all major currencies, including USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, AUD, HKD, SGD and more.

Learn more and apply for an account today at currenxie.com.

Generative AI such as Google’s Bard and ChatGPT doesn’t create content from scratch. It repurposes it from original sources.

Valid reasons could prompt a website to prevent AI bots from using its content, including:

• Protect intellectual property. Blocking generative AI could protect unique content, ideas, or products from being copied or reused.

• Misrepresentation. AI answers could misinterpret or misuse content.

• Limited usefulness. AI answers generate little (or no) traffic to the publishers who provide them.

• User control. Blocking AI bots allows creators more control over how and where their content appears online.

Bard represents an added concern: What if Google’s Search Generative Experience uses content for an answer without citing the source, such as your company?

There’s no good solution. I know no method to prevent Bard from using your content without jeopardizing organic search performance.

Nonetheless, Google recommends two ways to block or control Bard.

Use Google-Extended

Bard uses the same user agent as Google Search when collecting data, so blocking it disables Googlebot from crawling your site and collecting relevancy signals.

Google-Extended is the company’s solution. It blocks Bard without affecting Google’s index and ranking algorithm.

To use, add a disallow directive in your site’s robot.text file, as follows:

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

The directive does not stop Google from showing your content in SGE’s answers, with or without citations. Its purpose, per Google, is to prevent SGE from learning from it.

Use Nosnippet, Max-snippet, or Data-nosnippet

SGE will follow Google-approved meta tags and attributes:

• no-snippet meta tag prevents AI answers from showing any parts of your content.

• max-snippet robots meta tag allows creators to set the maximum number of characters AI can include from your content.

• data-nosnippet HTML attribute enables creators to designate any text from an HTML page to be excluded from a search snippet.

All three options could make organic and featured snippets appear weak and less clickable. Thus I don’t recommend them to sites relying on organic search traffic.

Images, which in my testing often appear in SGE’s results, cannot be blocked, according to Google.

Blocking Other AI Bots

New generative AI platforms show up seemingly monthly. Blocking all of them will be difficult. We can block or contorl three non-Google bots:

• Use robots.txt to block GPTbot (ChatGPT) and CCbot (Common Crawl).

• Use both nocache and noarchive meta tags to control Bingbot. The tags will not impact Bing’s organic search rankings, although they will disable Google’s cache and prevent Wayback Machine from archiving pages.

To track down and counter the sudden disappearance of tokens from crypto wallets requires investors to know the various ways bad actors use to steal cryptocurrencies successfully. 

Blockchain investigator Bitrace has identified three effective ways hackers gain access to crypto investors’ wallets — search engines such as Google and Bing, pasteboard hijacking and Liquidity mining and coin theft.

Crypto investors claiming “my coins disappeared suddenly” have been found to have recently downloaded crypto applications from unverified sources. Attackers use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to rank higher on internet searches, unknowingly coercing users to download and sign up to fake apps with backdoors.

Pastaboard hijacking involves the process of automatically grabbing or modifying previously copied text data from clipboards. The technique often skims seed phrases of users, which can be used later to access wallets and drain funds. Bitrace highlighted how a fake Telegram app was being used to replace the destination wallet address copied in the clipboard, causing users to send their tokens to the hacker.

Finally, the classic “high yield and low risk” liquidity scams also ranked as one of the three most popular scams resulting in the disappearance of tokens. Bitrace recommended three methods crypto users could use to trace the stolen funds, starting with tracing back the transaction fees. Investigators often find the hacker’s address by tracking down the source of the transaction fees that was paid to move the stolen funds.

Other ways investors can improve their chances of retrieving stolen funds include using blockchain explorers and professional tools. To know more about how to track stolen crypto, read Cointelegraph Research’s article on how blockchain analysis helps recover funds.

Related: Crypto thief steals $4.4M in a day as toll rises from LastPass breach

In addition to targeting investors, attackers often steal funds from crypto organizations as well. As part of the remediation of a recent exploit, Maestrobots, a group of cryptocurrency bots on the Telegram messenger app, paid a total of 610 ETH in its own revenue to cover all the user losses, worth more than $1 million.

Wrapping up the Exploit Saga

First things first:

Maestro: Router 2 was exploited about 10 hours ago on ETH Mainnet, and some tokens (not ETH) were siphoned away. Within 30 minutes of the start of the attack, our team identified and fully removed the exploit. If you’re…

— Maestro (@MaestroBots) October 25, 2023

Blockchain security firm CertiK confirmed to Cointelegraph that it has been able to detect the transactions showing the 334 ETH compensation paid out to users from Maestro. “Most of these tokens pumped back up due to the anticipation that we were gonna market buy the tokens. Most of these tokens are still alive and kicking,” a spokesperson for Maestrobots told Cointelegraph.

Magazine: Ethereum restaking: Blockchain innovation or dangerous house of cards?