5 ways that technology could affect your insurance policies

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With each year that passes, the improvements in technology get more and more drastic and impressive. The truly revolutionary advancements offer up the opportunity for increased efficiency and accuracy in their industries as well as unintentional opportunities for change in other stakeholder industries. Insurance is one of those stakeholder industries which adapts and changes depending on increased technologies in other sectors.

Not only does change in the technology itself affect how insurance companies calculate risk and therefore offer consumers policies, now and in the near future the way that a consumer uses certain technologies will undoubtedly fall into the eye line of brokers. But what exactly are the biggest improvements in the market or upcoming technologies which may alter your insurance quotes, and are they good or bad?

Here are five to watch out for:

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The selfie and face recognition

Did you know that companies are utilizing the selfie as a method for calculating life insurance quotes? The idea behind it is that your face over time gives away how much you age, and potentially how long you may live. In the future you may not even need a medical exam to be eligible for specific quotes, instead, your old selfies may be collated chronologically and an assessment created based on that alone.

IntelliQuote has options for insurance which could help you beat the technology. With term, permanent and guaranteed universal life insurance policies helping you to fix your premiums before face recognition becomes a marketed contributing factor.

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Tesla Model S

Smart cars and crash avoidance systems

Smart cars are already coming and indeed, in some form or other are already here. Whether it is Tesla’s or Google’s driverless cars, or simply lasers, sensors, and cameras which detect a crash before you have the chance to react to it yourself, vehicles are getting safer and safer thanks to technology. This is maybe a negative for the gearhead out there who seeks the open road and the thrill of getting behind the wheel and being in total control but is 100% a positive thing when it comes down to insurance premiums. The safer the cars and less likely to crash they are, the cheaper your annual bills will be.

Geotagging and geolocation

Everyone and their dog has a social media account now, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or anything else out there. People’s favorite jealousy-inducer amongst friends these days is to share their location via geotagging. Whether at a concert, on vacation, out with the family for the weekend or for any other event that’s deemed share-worthy, it’s a great way of keeping your nearest and dearest in the loop.

It’s also an excellent technology for keeping would-be home invaders and muggers in the know, depending on your privacy settings. This is a problem which has already affected celebrities out there, with Kim Kardashian having recently been robbed when she shared her location on a recent trip to Paris, and along with it, which jewelry she had brought along. It may get to the point where insurance companies can analyze how frequently you publish your time away from the home and your time in it, your privacy settings, reducing your likelihood to claim in the event that you are burgled.

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Apple Watch

Wearable technology

Wearable technology is the next big thing to help consumers reduce their health insurance premiums. With constant monitoring of exercise, body temperature and other factors which help indicate a person’s health, alongside monitoring diet and other external factors, premiums can be more accurately calculated. The user will be able to analyze their own progress like never before and help themselves to drive down their own monthly premiums.

Big data and AI’s ability to interpret it

With more data being collected on people than people themselves are able to process, it’s now down to artificial intelligence (AI) to start computing the information and calculating risks more accurately for us. Insurers will start using AI in droves out of necessity, as other brokers win over customers with more complete and tailored policies to them. Big data will only get bigger – as our clicks on various sites we use and forms we fill out are collected and stored with more and more information on us to fully profile us and our habits – soon it will get to the point where companies know more about us than we do. Bad for privacy, good for only paying what you should be paying in insurance premiums.

As ever with technologies, there are pros and cons that are part and parcel of their development. With the cons, they’re mostly down to the human understanding of the technology that’s out there – exploiting geotagging for example. Pros, on the other hand, tend to be down to infallible data collection creating a more customized and tailored profile of each person, and therefore reflecting a more accurate risk to each and every policy.

Last Updated on August 11, 2019.

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