ID#84

Transkript

Hartmut Mai

Hello, and welcome to ID- which stands for Industrial Insurance Digital, the podcast for the insurance community in Germany and beyond. My name is Hartmut Mai, and I’m the co-host today with my dear colleague, Benjamin. Benjamin, how are you doing?

 

Benjamin Zühr

Not too bad. Thanks. And we both are thrilled that you’re joining us today.

 

Hartmut Mai

Today we have a very special topic on the digitalization front of insurance, and namely the adoption of digital solutions in the cyber insurance world. To dive deeper into this, we’ve invited Nir Perry, the CEO and founder of Cyberwrite.

So stay tuned, and please don’t forget, if you enjoyed this episode, to subscribe to our podcast and leave a review. It really helps us out. So sit back, relax, and let’s dive into the exciting episode.

Nir, before we start, why don’t you actually introduce yourself quickly so everybody knows exactly who’s talking to us?

 

Nir Perry

Sure. So, my name is Nir Perry, I’m the CEO and founder of a company called CyberWrite. Cyberwrite provides data and analytics to insurance companies, to brokers, and to reinsurance companies to do three things.

To sell more cyber insurance, to enable the brokers to sell cyber insurance, to enable the insurance companies to better underwrite in real time companies of any size. We started with very small businesses, but we can do business of any size, and we provide a cyber risk report within 30 seconds. And for reinsurance companies and Lloyds syndicates, we actually also provide catastrophe modeling, enabling them to predict the next catastrophe and when it’s going to happen, how big it’s going to be.

When I started the company, I had about 15 years of experience in cybersecurity. I worked before on behalf of Accenture at Allianz and Deutsche Bank, and before that in large banks on counter fraud departments and conducting audits on behalf of companies like PwC and Deloitte. But my family are all in insurance.

My father is an insurance broker for 51 years, and my brother is an insurance broker. And so I always had discussions about insurance. And obviously, when I worked at Allianz, and I think Hartwood, we’ve met a couple of times there as well, we’ve seen that there is a huge opportunity to actually innovate and create digital solutions for the world of insurance.

Obviously, my background is very strong in cyber, so I went for the cyber insurance side of things, which in 2017 was mainly for very large companies. But today, every company around the world should have cyber insurance, whether they’re large or small. If you use computers and your data is at risk or you could get locked out, you should have a cyber insurance policy.

It could be a small policy, it could be a large policy, but it should definitely have something to protect you in case of a breach, unless you have enough money to cover yourself. And even then, it’s actually quite hard to find service providers on day one. And so when taking a look into my background, I’ve done quite a lot of things in the cyber world.

I’ve also worked for insurance companies. And so it was just natural for me to go and develop solutions for this niche market of cyber insurance, which is now growing. It’s already grown to almost $20 billion in annual premiums, and it’s expected to reach $50 billion by 2035.

Our solution is enabling the growth of this market. We work with companies like HSB from the Munich Re Group, Markel, Mapfre, Aon in several countries and many more around the world. We are active in 52 countries and in seven languages.

 

Hartmut Mai

So, first of all, we’re really, really pleased to actually have you on our podcast. I think we’ve worked for many years in the past. We know each other for almost two decades.

So I know you very well, and I know that you are actually one of the proven experts who talk about the cyber topic, which is partly a topic for us today. But more interesting is to really see how cyber is driving digitalization to the insurance world. And this is really our topic today, especially in an environment where AI is not just a buzzword anymore.

AI is happening as we speak. Everybody uses this, and this comes with certain risks attached to it, as we all know. And the question is how digitalization is used in order to get our arms around these risks and from an insurance perspective.

 

Nir Perry

Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me, Hartmut and Benjamin.

It’s a pleasure to be here. I guess I’ll answer your first question, Hartmut. It’s a great topic to discuss.

The digitalization of insurance. And of course, there is no digitalization without AI in 2025. So there is a lot that can be said here.

I think we’ve seen the beginning of the last phase of digitalization in insurance with InsurTech coming up in 2016, 2017. That’s where the company that I started and still am running, Cyberite, started as well. For example, we provide the world with the digital solution for the underwriting sales and catastrophe risk management for insurance against cyber attacks, cyber insurance.

And so just like us, there are companies doing the same for health and life, for other lines of business, for the whole professional lines, etc., etc. And obviously, there are many solutions that are enablers, while there are some other companies who are providing digital solutions to their own services, which are disruptors, such as in the world of insurance against cyber attacks, you’re looking at companies like Aitbe and the Coalition and Cowbell, etc. And so there are the companies who enable and the companies who disrupt.

 

Hartmut Mai

Nir, actually, that’s very interesting to hear, but can you please tell us, I mean, we focus normally on the German market here and everyone talks about digitalization. But in reality, companies, especially insurers, still focus on reducing, for example, legacy systems instead of transforming the existing business model into a digital business model. How does this work in the U.S. market? Is this the same or do you see a difference there?

 

Nir Perry

Well, I think there are a few key differences between Europe and the U.S. on many levels. First of all, you know, the U.S. is sort of a flat market in terms of language and currency. And so it’s much easier for many companies to enable in an early stage companies in the U.S. We, for example, we are providing our solution in seven languages and any currency in Europe, but many companies have not developed that ability in-house and so they can’t do it. And so in Europe, the digitalization is always lagging behind because most innovation is actually coming from Silicon Valley and sometimes New York and sometimes Tel Aviv in Israel, which is the second largest hub for innovation on both in general and in insurtech. But Europe is a bit lagging behind. And this is actually augmented by, I think there has been a lot of online discussions we’ve all seen on LinkedIn recently about the overregulation of AI in the European Union, preventing from companies actually achieving any significant advancement in AI compared to what we’ve seen coming from the U.S. and obviously compared to what we’ve seen coming from China with the deepfake. But I think, you know, when you take a look at insurance companies, that’s a good question. Many of them are just interested in moving to new solutions, but it takes a lot of time because of the complexity and the potential impact on production. Right.

And so the digital production or the production of policies and also the production of policies, actually. And so when you take a look into how much time it takes them, you know, they’re very, very slow. They’re even slower than banks, I would say as slow sometimes as government.

And it just takes more time because of the size of the system, because of the huge amount of people involved and because of the fact that most of the systems are sometimes even still using mainframe, which is, you know, has been developed in the 80s and moving to new digital fronts is slow, but it’s happening and we see it happening across many and most insurance companies. Many of the forms that you used to see, funny I ask you, I remember when I when I joined insurance, I said, why does the form look like that? It looks like it came out of a mainframe computer.

 

And someone said, because it did. How is that possible? You know, we’re now in 2015.

Why are you using mainframe to create a digital form? Why not have another system in the middle? Making a nice form that would enable the insurer to actually understand in normal words what what they’re buying instead of having like, you know, an A4 page with capital letters, you know, all squeezed one after the other without any formatization.

And so there is definitely a difference between the U.S. and Europe. And I think Europe is just moving a bit slower than than the U.S. for reasons that innovation is coming actually from abroad and a bit of maybe overregulation. I remember maybe 10 years ago when people were moving to the cloud, you know, 2012, 2013, where in Germany specifically, we spoke with insurance companies.

I was working back in the day on behalf of Accenture at companies like Allianz and Deutsche Bank, telling us, you know, in many cases, German insurance companies cannot move data to the cloud yet because it’s countering the regulation. While in the U.S., everything was in the cloud because the understanding was there that the cloud is more secure than hosted on a small insurance company servers. And so a lot of differences over there.

 

Hartmut Mai

Yeah, and and quite honestly, I think digitalization has has much more to deliver in terms of new business models, et cetera. Right. It’s and we haven’t seen so so so many of that or so much of that right now in Germany.

So what do you think, you know, also from a from, you know, a cyber perspective, my observation is that we we that the end product is always the same. It’s like we do sell stuff like we did for the past 300 years. We only might actually use digital means to that to that instead of paper.

But what what would would the digitalization world open open up in terms of new business models which need to be adopted as well? And I’m not talking just about disruption. I’m talking about creating something completely new

And what I’m actually thinking of is, for example, the world of NatCat as an example, where where insurance companies are basically taking risk and sell it to the capital markets in order to to to get fresh capacity from for access capacity from from from the financial industry. So do you think the same would actually happen in in insurance means?

 

Nir Perry

Yeah, well, the world of ILS basically going to get capacity from the capital markets to special purpose vehicles that deploy them to carriers is definitely coming. And I think that the digitalization of the whole process enables more data collection to enable more investors who are not necessarily legacy investors in insurance actually have the data and the comfort to invest into the insurance ecosystem with the extra capacity, which is much needed. And it’s not just obviously in NETCAD, it’s also in cyber.

We’ve seen four cyber cut bonds already that have been launched in the last, I think, two or three years, which is new, and there are probably more to come. And this is all possible because of this digitalization of data collection. You know, it’s sometimes it’s it’s amazing to say, but, you know, insurance companies don’t necessarily have all the data that they want about some of the insurers, not only pre claim, but also post claim.

Sometimes they’re not really I know about cyber insurance, but, you know, there is a claim and then the insurance company is sending the forensics team, which is usually at least in the U.S. is comprised of both technical experts and legal experts, because there are obviously legal matters involved in it. And then, you know, when they’re getting the breach report from the insured, they don’t necessarily know for sure if they have the whole data or the full data. Maybe some of the things that have been discovered in the first, you know, two to three weeks of analysis are not complete.

Maybe they will only discover some of this stuff three months afterwards in additional analysis. And so the digitalization actually helps the insurance company to collect more data, to stay in better touch with the insured, to understand where they are in the process of the claim or in the process of preparing for underwriting. Insurance companies can communicate their requirements for underwriting well ahead of time, thanks to systems like cyber.

For example, we have with our customers in the U.S., they’re offering our reports to insurers through the brokers so that the insured would know well in advance what is expected to them of them in terms of preparing for cyber underwriting, in terms of fixing certain vulnerabilities and certain issues. And so this is really something that if you would say, you know, 20 years ago or 10 years ago, most insurance companies were not communicating at all to insurers. And now you’re able to provide it.

And that’s all thanks to digitalization of the ecosystem.

 

Benjamin Zühr

From my point of view, if we look at the industrial insurance at all, I don’t really see a competitive advantage due to digitalization today in the German market. So this is what I feel. Maybe this is wrong

So especially the brokers, from my point of view, still focus on the traditional business model, so face to the customer and all the stuff. So I never heard that due to a digital process, a customer decides for another broker. So maybe cyber is a bit different because it’s a new line of business, but especially within the traditional lines of business, this is my experience.

Do you have the same experience, not just in cyber, but also in other lines of business? Or do you see another trend? And when do you think this might change, that really digitalization brings a competitive advantage to the market?

 

Nir Perry

Maybe because I’m in the eye of the digitalization storm, I see it differently. But in my perspective, brokers who are not moving into more of a digital value proposition to their customers are disappearing, at least in some other geographies I have seen in recent years. And when I say recent years, I mean the 15-20 years, is that small agencies tend to disappear, while some others are embedding together and are becoming larger.

And with a larger agency, you have more budget to actually invest in digitalization. And we can take our customer, Howden, as an excellent example of that. Howden has been pushing on digital solutions for the insurers in 50-something geographies all around the world.

And I think Mr. Howden has done an amazing job in providing digital solutions together with insurance to companies all around the world. By the way, also in Germany, Howden is using the cyber right solutions to provide the cyber risk reports to insurers. And this is enabling the insurer to better prepare for cyber underwriting and get the policy they need.

 

While in fact, some of the smaller brokers who don’t have access to such solutions, because they don’t have the budget or they don’t have the IT team to examine such solutions and decide which ones to use, are being harmed financially over the long term. And so when we take a look into is it happening, I think it’s definitely happening. Is it felt immediately-

Probably no. It’s felt over a span of a decade or two. But they are losing business, because eventually many business owners today, at least in the U.S., what we see is they go online. One of the examples is Biberk. So Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s company, has launched Biberk, which is the digital first insurance solution for businesses. You can go, you can say, OK, I need liability this or indemnity that, and you get the policy that you need in seconds.

Maybe you get a phone call from an underwriter later asking a few questions, but it’s happening much quicker and it’s much easier than going to your broker and getting a phone call or waiting for them to respond and doing all of that. And this is not some new digital startup out of Silicon Valley. This is Berkshire Hathaway.

And so I think the world is definitely moving there. Obviously, the digitalization of insurance is not as quick as the digitalization in some of the other sectors. I think by default, insurance people, for example, because they’re not tech people, are less quick to adopt new technologies, for example, compared to life science companies or compared to telco companies which are using tech on a day-to-day basis.

And so they have the infrastructure and the talent to actually assess these solutions and come to conclusions very quickly. Insurance people are more concerned about insurance, which is less digital by definition. And so it’s happening a bit slower, but it’s not happening very slow.

It just takes a few more years to get there because of some of those special characteristics. But what we see today is whoever is not doing digital value proposition and offering digital solutions will eventually be out of the markets.

 

Hartmut Mai

Nir, would you agree, from my perspective, the cyber line of business is changing the way we look into insurance today? Why? Because we don’t only look into providing the data from a client perspective, underwriting the data, and then putting a policy together in order to actually pay as soon as a loss happens.

So what the cyber companies like CyberRiders, being one of them, actually does is they have a more holistic risk management approach to this topic. So it is, yes, a support for the underwriters, yes, a support for the brokers, but evenly a support for the customers, i.e., to prevent loss scenarios and to prepare for them and to not just hope that there’s an insurance company backing me up as soon as a loss happens, but to actively support organizations from a risk management perspective, i.e., to prevent a loss or to prevent some black hat sneaking in through the back door. Now, when you take this philosophy in cyber and bring it to other lines of business, right, this is actually the change of the business model I was talking about. How viable do you see this trend?

Would you see a trend in that respect, where cyber could be actually one of the front runners and one of the front lines to actually change the way other lines of business are looking to risk?

 

Nir Perry

Yeah, I think that cyber is definitely one of the main lines that have adopted digitalization just because it’s digital by nature, right, more than some of the others. But honestly, I think that today, when you take a look into things, mostly all business lines have some level of digitalization to them. Some others, you know, and again, going back to AI, are now insurance companies are using AI for ingestion of forms, right, for anything.

So instead of having the underwriter take the form and type it all into the computer, they throw it into an upload box and eventually the form is being ingested automatically compared to risk appetite and telling the underwriter in real time, hey, like you should or you should not insure this company. So this is sort of already happening. And, you know, the digital underwriter is actually an augmented underwriter.

The AI is currently not replacing the underwriter, but is augmenting them, giving them the information they need and saving them a lot of time. So already now, you know, people talked about five, six, seven years ago, you know, what’s going to happen with the underwriters? Will underwriters have a job, you know, in 10, 15, 20 years?

And I think there will be underwriters with a job, but you have to be specialized in some topic. If you’re just underwriting something which is, you know, very simple, I think many insurance companies would save a bit of money by moving to AI underwriting. And we’re not even talking about, so obviously there are the quantitative AI, which is using machine learning to predict the probability of claims.

And there is the generative AI, which everybody’s talking about right now in the news, which is very different than the quantitative AI that is just there to provide predictive analytics. With generative AI, you can actually create an underwriting entity that is creating reasoning that is in many cases already today at PhD level. It’s already today at PhD level, and just imagine suddenly you have a PhD as an underwriter sitting on a policy for each and every one of your policies, and with the cost of a few dollars per month.

This is a true risk, and this change is a true risk, of course, for the underwriters. It’s a true opportunity for the insurance companies to provide the faster service for less money. And so I think it’s happening across business lines.

It’ll take another 15, 20 years to, I guess, maybe less, but to fully be there because regulation and for the industry to accept everything we see. We’re now in 2025. Everybody’s on cloud.

It took 10, 15 years to get there. So with AI, I’m guessing it could be faster, but insurance companies would be more cautious. But eventually, definitely this would impact any and all business lines.

The capability to actually take abstract data and get a PhD level or more level analysis on those types of data within seconds is something that until maybe two years ago, we were all just dreaming of such a potential, and now it’s done.

 

Hartmut Mai:

And maybe take these insights to engineer risks, right? So at the front line, i.e. to help clients to actually prevent risks by an augmented risk management approach, and the back line to actually help insurance companies to actually see risk off into not only the insurance market, but also into the capital markets. So I really see that AI and digitalization could help that entire value chain in something we actually looked at in the past from a risk transfers perspective into much more than that.

 

Benjamin Zühr

But Nir, what do you think? Does this digital transformation process change the business model of the broker, especially in regards of risk management? What do you think?

How will this digitalization process will change the whole business model for brokers and for carriers? And do you already see some trends there? Because I mean, especially the big brokers have, for example, risk management departments, but normally risk management and insurance management are separated.

So how do you think that AI and digitalization will change this?

 

Nir Perry

Well, it’s hard to say, but just a few thoughts. On the enablement side, if you’re a broker listening to this podcast, you can use AI today to offer your customers analysis that was only available before to companies like Aon and Marsh and Howden and Willis. And now you have at the palm of your hand for, I don’t know, $29 a month, a risk management platform that can take the data about your customer and provide risk insights that are extensive and insightful and very useful for them.

And so you’re able to actually offer proactive actions to be taken. You’re able to offer stuff that maybe before were not really in your scope of abilities. And this is not to say that the broker was not an expert of insurance, but there are fine-tuned details of each and every business line that are just beyond one person.

Or let’s say if you have an office or five or 10 people, you don’t necessarily have the risk management practice within your firm, which is mainly available for mid-size and large insurance practices. So that’s one way that it impacts it. But on the other hand, customers want quick support.

And what will happen to all the customer support people? I can tell you that recently I saw a post about a product online called Brody. And I said, wow, this is interesting.

 

I want to give it a try. Have you guys seen Brody? So I sent an email to Brody.

Hi, I’d like to get some information with my phone number. And within 30 seconds, I get a phone call from something that sounds like a human. And hey, it’s Brody. How are you doing today? I’m good. How are you? And we have a full conversation for half an hour. At the end, he said, so listen, if it’s OK for you, I’d like to introduce you to some venture capitalists and some potential clients. And within a day or two, I started getting introductions to people who are relevant to my practice.

And now they introduce us to potential several clients and a couple of… And he said, by the way, if you need anything, just give me a call. We are already in this phase where you are able to speak with something that sounds like a human and giving you information which is based on a vast amount of historical insights and knowledge.

 

And this is something that is going to disrupt also the brokers. Because if brokers are not going to adapt, not only brokers, if they’re not going to adapt these technologies, they’re going to be left behind. And if they will adapt these technologies, there are going to be a lot of humans who are left behind.

Because really, if you’re calling a support of an insurance company and you can do the whole support using just a person that is actually digital, you can basically completely remove probably most of your support infrastructure. So from one hand, a huge opportunity for companies. And from the other hand, a huge threat to people who don’t adopt it or to people who are impacted by this type of services who will replace humans on, I would say, the roles that can be automated 100 percent using AI.

 

Benjamin Zühr

And do you think that AI has the power to fully replace traditional underwriting?

 

Nir Perry

It depends on the business line and it depends on the level of comfort that people will have. Time will tell. I don’t think it will fully replace business underwriting completely.

I think there will still be human involvement at some level because the AIs do have sometimes what’s being called hallucinations where they are imagining things because of the way that they are built.

And so you have to have some level of human interruption there to make sure that things don’t go completely south without anybody noticing. We’ve all seen the 80s movies about the AI starting a nuclear war or ending the world. So humans have to have some level of oversight and intervention levels and understanding.

Here we’re talking about insurance, not other, for example, military level implementations. I think it will not fully replace it anytime soon, but I think it’s definitely having a huge impact on enabling underwriters to make better decisions. And it’s a huge opportunity for everyone.

However, it will have impact on underwriters which are not experts in their field.

 

Hartmut Mai

And I think it also can happen that companies who use AI in short term, especially to help with underwriting processes, will have definitely a competitive advantage, don’t they?

 

Nir Perry

Yeah, I think, for example, underwriters that are using our type of systems are getting data in real time on over 320 million companies around the world about their cyber security posture and how that compares to industry peers, how much damage they’re going to have and how they can improve, right? And so the fact that you can choose any company in the world, throw it into a system, and within seconds you can give them a PDF report saying, hey, this is how you should improve your security. And this is how much it’s going to cost you if you will have a breach.

It’s something that did not exist in the hands of underwriters or brokers until a few years ago. And obviously, it’s making them much more knowledgeable. When you, as a broker, come to a customer and say, hey, here is the report with the broker’s logo on top of it or the carrier’s logo on top of it, and say, by the way, you have 3.5% of suffering a breach this year, it’s going to cost you $7 million to $10 million. And here is what you can do to reduce the chance and reduce the potential damage, then people are very much appreciative because the broker is not just taking money, giving them a piece of paper. He’s taking money, he or she may be taking money, giving a piece of paper, but also solid advice about how they can run their business better. And I think businesses are very appreciative of brokers who take the extra mile or in Europe, the extra kilometer to actually go and provide them with the added value services.

And those things are not that expensive. And the broker, you can actually provide them and get the extra value yourself for quite a good price compared to what it used to be 15 years ago.

 

Hartmut Mai

Well, you become a trusted advisor, right? That’s a big difference. Yes, you want to be the trusted advisor for the business.

 

Benjamin Zühr

Do you think that there’s enough money in the market for the digital transformation? I mean, most of the innovation comes from startups. And from my point of view, sometimes there’s not enough money for the digital transformation in the market. So what do you think?

 

Nir Perry

Sorry, I’m not sure if I understand the question. How do you mean? For whom?For the brokers?

 

Benjamin Zühr

No, it’s a transformation process. So from a, I don’t know, from a today process, so without digital or no digital process to a digital process, you need lots of money for the transformation. And do you think the budgets the companies have are high enough to realize the digital transformation? Or do you think actually, yeah, it’s not enough money in the market for this transformation?

 

Nir Perry

I think the question that everybody needs to ask themselves is, can they afford not to do digitalization? If they decide not to afford digitalization, they will have costs as well. I remember my father, he’s a broker now for 51 years.

And I remember as a kid, I used to run around his office and people would go around with this huge paper folders for each insured with each and every one of the policies that they have inside. And when was the last time that you’ve seen a folder with paper with policies inside that you put in those things that you used to roll back, you know, and you put them inside and we’ll push it back in again. And then when you need to find them, you go one after the other.

I mean, digitalization has already happened around the early 2000s of the insurance agency. You know, products like agency management systems and others for managing insurance agencies have been, I don’t think you would find any agency around the world today that is using paper for policies. At least I hope so.

 

Benjamin Zühr

Yeah, I definitely disagree.

 

Nir Perry

Really? You still see people working without a digital system for policy management?

 

Benjamin Zühr

Yeah, no, but still they have, if they say, I know many companies who use paper. So this is still something which is, yeah, it’s part of the daily business.

 

Nir Perry

So this is a regulatory requirement for people to actually sign in ink? Or what would be the reason for that?

 

Benjamin Zühr

I mean, I think there are several reasons. I mean, they are used to it. This could be one reason.

And then maybe there are some requirements from the government side. I don’t know. But I definitely know that lots of printing is still, I mean, it’s normal.

 

Nir Perry

We work with a couple of insurance brokers on the policy that we have around the world. And I don’t remember any time in the last eight or nine years that we have actually signed in paper for insurance. It’s all digital, signed using DocuSign, sealed using PDF, Adobe.

I haven’t seen paper in a very long time. In fact, I have a printer and it’s collecting dust. And so, you know, I’m not even sure it would work effectively because there is almost nothing today that is being done.

If you go to the government, everything is digital. If you go to your accountant, you know, the annual reports are signed digitally these days. The sending them, you upload them online.

So I know most of the, at least in the US, most of it is, from my perspective, is digital. But, you know, I mean, it’s such a game changer when you don’t have to print anymore. One of the most interesting things I’ve seen in the past is I’ve seen people taking our report, which is digital, and scanning it, printing it, and then somebody’s scanning it again because they couldn’t get the original version, I guess, for some reason, right?

And so we see our own cyber risk reports in a scanned version where they’re coming with an angle because the scanners are not really pulling the paper correctly. And you see it from time to time. You go like, send support at CyberEye.com an email and we will provide you with your report. There is no need to scan paper because it’s been created in a computer. So the original version is somewhere out there. So no, I haven’t seen that.

 

Benjamin Zühr

Yeah, nice. I mean, you have a different perspective. I mean, and actually, this is really interesting.

So from my side, one last question. What is your vision for the market on the one hand side and for cyber right on the other hand side?

 

Nir Perry

Well, maybe going back a couple of steps. The insurtech market has changed in the last 10 years quite drastically. In 2016 and 2017, we saw a huge wave of insurtech starting, both enablers and disruptors.

And around 2022, 2023, together in general with the end of the cycle of investments into startups, you know, valuations went down and investments went down altogether. The M&A went down and the interest rates went up, which obviously impacted everything. You have a lot of businesses who basically either pivoted or moved to do something else.

And so you have today much less insurtech than you had maybe three or four years ago. But still, there is a lot of innovation coming out, enough innovation. I think before there may be maybe we had too much innovation coming into the market, which was not normal.

But I think that you’re going to continue to see companies like Cyberight continue to enable carriers and continue to enable brokers to provide better services, to get better risk analysis, and to be able to predict claims and catastrophes using data-driven solutions that are utilizing AI, both the LLM side and the quantitative AI using machine learning and other algorithms to get lower loss ratios, to be more profitable. And by doing so, by the way, they’re able to provide lower prices to insurers that are eventually, you know, getting a better service and a better price and making you as a carrier and as a broker more competitive.

And so the digitalization of this whole ecosystem is definitely something that is working for the benefit of everyone. It’s funny, you know, I saw an article about maybe a couple of years back, they were talking about the new dashboards in cars, when you see the BMWs and the Audis, et cetera, you see everything is digital. And we’re like, wow, you know, this is really beautiful.

But it’s not the reason they did it. Apparently it saves them millions of millions of dollars to move to digital dashboards because they don’t have to order each and every one of the parts you know, for the speedometer and for those types of parts. And so instead of having 60, 70 parts for a dashboard that they had to have before, today you just buy an LCD screen and they install it and you have a dashboard.

And it’s all being managed by one chip, which is much cheaper today than it used to be before. And so this type of digitalization is saving money for people. It’s giving better experience for the user.

Everybody’s happier, aside potentially from the guy who used to manufacture those extra parts for the dashboard.

 

Benjamin Zühr

Very nice picture.

 

Nir Perry

So it’s happening across the board, not only in insurance, of course, but everywhere.

Hartmut Mai

Very good. I think we actually close on this very positive note that the real luxury products, and this is not just in watches, it might be actually on dashboards and insurance in future as well, are in fact the analog products rather than the digital products. So it was a pleasure having you here.

So it was very insightful talk. Benny, thank you very much for co-hosting this session as well. To all the listeners to us, please don’t forget to give us a review and maybe like this podcast session as well. So all the best to you.

Nir Perry

Neil, thank you again. Thank you for having me, Benjamin. Thank you very much and have a great afternoon.

Benjamin Zühr

Thank you a lot.