It’s 1984 and little has changed in the insurance world. We still use manual typewriters. Insurance policies have $50 deductibles for home insurance and replacement cost protection for houses and contents doesn’t exist yet. Fast forward 35 years and the insurance world is entirely different. The fax machine has come and gone. Regular mail is almost a thing of the past and if it cannot be done on an app, one had better be in the design phase to correct that immediately.
The speed at which things used to get done was, by today’s standards, unbearably slow. Insurance is complex though. It is more complicated now, more than ever before. When I first started, if it wasn’t wind, fire, or lightning, there was a pretty good chance there was no coverage. Now? ID Theft is an increasingly important protection. You can buy coverage for a broken utility line. You can even get a car from Volvo on a subscription basis that has the insurance built right into the subscription. All of society’s changes create the expectation that everything can and should be done faster, yet all of these changes make the process of review and buying insurance more complicated than ever before.
In a series of upcoming blogs, we will address the ever changing landscape of available coverages. We will spend some time reviewing the concept of an insurance score, and I will discuss how technology, like the smart house, the internet of things, and accident avoidance tech will change everything… and nothing.