How Insurtechs Can Unlock The Opportunity

Cyber risk is not just a wholly digital risk – it spills over into the physical world of tangible assets as well, e.g. hacking into a fire protection sprinkler system could lead to flooding and damage to physical property.

An integrated view of cyber is critical to fully address the range of risks that it can give rise to.

Cyber risk is a bridge between tangible and intangible assets, which leaves organisations exposed to a much wider scale of damage, which is not often adequately insured since Cyber Insurance has historically been focused on digital assets, such as client’s personal data or transactional data.

The increase in cyber attacks along with its wider impact has led insurers clients and insurers to rethink the knock-on effect on other insurance lines like personal (reputation), property (physical damage), intellectual property (competitor information) etc.

A collaboration between i2c and PYMNTS.com

When it comes to innovation in payments, the hip new alternative finance players — from Bitcoin-based startups to Lending Club to Venmo — get much of the press. In fact, hardly a week goes by without an article on cryptocurrency in the Wall Street Journal, and a hardly a day goes by without one in tech media like TechCrunch.

They have benefited enormously from innovation led by FIs over the last decade, from ATMs that provide an increasing variety of services to mobile banking, one of the apps types most commonly used by smartphone users.

Of course, very large banks, such as JPMorgan Chase, have the money to invest in innovation. They can grow their own or buy companies, such as up-and-coming FinTechs, to introduce new products and features to their customers. The majority of FIs, however, are relatively small. The 25th largest FI in the U.S. in 2016 has assets of $116.38 billion. As of June 2017, there were nearly 11,565 FIs with fewer than $116 billion in assets, and they accounted for just 28.1 percent of total bank assets.

Between being traditional and simultaneously lacking the deep pockets of a large brand, one might think FIs outside the Top 25 innovated about as often as the local taxi company. But, we surveyed financial institutions about innovation — defined as both the implementation of wholly new products and new features for existing products — and the results show that view is quite wrong.

We conducted a detailed survey of payments executives at FIs to study payments innovation in these institutions, excluding the largest 25 U.S. banks. We obtained a sample of 214 respondents representing the complete size distribution of various types of FIs throughout the country.

Zero Knowledge Proof in Blockchains

There are two significant challenges concerning the use of personal data in or with blockchains, which Sedicii’s ZKP (Zero Knowledge Proof) technology can address.

A key feature of a blockchain is decentralisation. This means that no central administrator or application logic is required in order to run it. Instead, the whole blockchain acts as a consensus mechanism to ensure all nodes stay in sync, enabling each one of them, independently, to verify every single transaction.

Decentralisation is important since it guarantees there is no single point of failure. That is, the blockchain is not affected in the event that an attacker corrupts the data in a few chain nodes. Moreover, in order for an attacker to control the blockchain, he would need to hack more than half of its nodes, which in most blockchains requires computational resources beyond the reach of any person or organization on the planet.

Video-based Recognition Technology for the Financial Industry

The way customers use banking and financial services is changing rapidly and forever. Also, how branches look and how customers interact with them is constantly being revised. Plus, online and mobile banking is on the rise and consequently security aspects become increasingly important.

A deluge of new technologies are all conspiring to meet these changing requirements. They evolve around mobile, big data, location-based services, the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine connection. DeepEyes video-based recognition capabilities integrate with all of these technologies and will make banking more secure and customer oriented, while at the same freeing up bank employees.

Cyber Insurance- To buy or not to buy

If you have been following the industry news on cyber security, you will realize that cyber insurance has been featured in many forums and discussions. In fact cyber insurance is getting a lot of attention and what's even more intriguing is that it's most often cyber security professionals from the forefront who promote the product. The insurer plays a major role in the policy issuance, however the product is technical hence the campaign is led by cyber security specialists. One other milestone achieved, is that we have moved from “What is cyber insurance?” to “Do I need to buy cyber insurance?”

Cyber insurance doesn’t replace the cyber security measures that a business undertakes to protect its information asset. As a business you still need to implement preventive controls e.g. Anti-malware solutions, policies, awareness programs, etc. as well as defense controls which could include: Firewalls, intrusion detection and protection systems. These cyber security measures reduce the risk and the residual risk is then transferred through an insurance cover. 

Written by AimBrain

In a digital world, how well do you really know your customer?

Using biometrics to authenticate oneself is already taking over from passwords, and is set to become the default option as new smartphones feature biometric technology as standard. Financial services was the first market to embrace biometric authentication, but as use cases evolve and the consumer interacts more with devices than traditional channels, the benefits of ditching the password span a wide range of industries.