The digitization of the insurance industry has entered an exciting phase: the start-ups of the new founders have blown away, they have to worry about how they manage the difficult scaling of their ideas (financially).
Established insurers have invested billions and feel quite well prepared - especially since the attack by the major US tech companies has not yet materialized.
In recent years, most of them have found inspiration in the Asian market. In China, for example, the idea of turning insurance customers into a large community and providing them with related service offerings has already been implemented. The world's largest insurer, Ping An, is a technical pioneer with a host of well-trained engineers who drive ideas forward. But this year it became clear what kind of worldly problems such a group can have to do with: the real estate crisis in China, the inefficient sales channels of the agents, the economic crisis in China, for example.
The Europeans are lulled into security by strict data protection regulations.
But that is precisely the risk in the current phase of digitization: that insurers will stop being open to new things and that they believe that they are already riding the wave well enough.
The technology cannot be stopped, the impact of a wrongly assessed wave could be particularly hard.