Data relating to the rapid expansion in employment prospects comes from Accenture. The analytics firm notes that the sector saw significant investment levels, hitting £218 million ($250 million) in just the first six-months of 2017. This was twice the level of investment in insurtech in the rest of the European Union.
Accenture also predict that this level of growth is unlikely to be stalled by Brexit, signaling the independent strength in relation to financial services, especially in London. This is reflected in the number of insurtech jobs growing by 22 percent per month over the course of 2017. This is way above the employment growth rate of just one percent for the whole U.K. economy, as reported by the analytics company Joblift.
Of these vacancies the most in-demand roles are web developers, followed by data analysts. These are followed by programmers, and then the ubiquitous consultants. These types of roles support technological innovations for business-to-business and business-to-consumer insurance procedures, covering the spectrum from contract to administration of policies and claims.
Interestingly, vacancies in traditional insurance have seen a decline, notwithstanding that seven out of every 10 insurance jobs is within the ‘traditional’ sector. Similar patterns are seen in Europe’s other main insurance (and insurtech) hub: Frankfurt, according to Insurance Business magazine.
These patterns are a clear sign of how the insurance sector is changing as a result of insurtech startup disruption. This trend has been picked up by a number of industry commentators, such as Nshish Nangla, who is the senior director of insurtech and digital transformation at Synechron.
In this context, Nangla says: “The latest technology trends will definitely change how the market works and how people interact with each other, as well as how things are presented in the market. There’s going to be a lot of change around customer engagement and how insurers communicate with their customers, and that might lead to disintermediation.”
As an example of the type of fierce startup to which these trends relate to, the company Canopy has announced it is embarking on a “rapid growth cycle”. This means an expansion of its RentPassport feature. Here landlords can obtain a profile of a would-be renter in advance of any contracts being signed. This relates to an electronic ‘trust score’ garnered from data screening and analysis of the prospective renters credit and employment history.
