Two more stunning disclosures from self-styled internet watchdog Chris Vickery underscore how organizations continue to routinely expose sensitive data in the cloud, risking dire consequences. “My findings clearly demonstrate that data breaches happen more often than the general public realizes, and companies are quick to deny and cover up these issues,” Vickery says. Vickery has revealed how Habitat for Humanity of Michigan had been making use of two backup virtual hard drives without taking steps to block public access to those drives, which contained “lots of background/credit checks for volunteers and applicants, as well as thousands of Social Security numbers,” he says. The nonprofit organization helps build and renovate affordable housing for needy families. Leaked files show grim reality In mid-October, Vickery broke news at IDT911’s Privacy Xchange Forum 2016 describing how a California law firm similarly neglected to restrict access to an internet cloud storage location where it kept copies of case files. (Note: IDT911 sponsors ThirdCertainty.) The legal documents Vickery located included notes and surveillance footage that appeared to show guards at a police holding cell in La Habra, CA, failing to take any action as 49-year-old prisoner Daniel Oppenheimer hanged himself. See also: Why Exactly Does Big Data Matter?   The notes of the lawyer — whose firm specialized in defending alleged police misconduct — revealed that he looked at the surveillance video and saw “shadows” of a person twice walking past Oppenheimer’s cell during the strangulation, Vickery says. The shadows weren’t noted, however, in the district attorney’s report investigating any wrongdoing by police in Oppenheimer’s death, and Vickery questions whether the person walking past the cell could have stopped the suicide. Oppenheimer strangled himself with a telephone cord and the zipper of his jail-issued jumpsuit on Jan. 2, 2015. Earlier that day, Oppenheimer was arrested and charged with attempting to strangle his wife at their La Habra home. Vickery says he contacted the city lawyer’s firm and an attorney representing Oppenheimer’s daughter who filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city. The firm wanted Vickery to delete what he found on the internet, and the attorney representing Oppenheimer’s daughter said he would subpoena what was discovered, Vickery says. Vickery hopes some official will be appointed to review what happened at the holding cell. “It’s important to see that justice was done,” he says. Helping patch problems Who is Chris Vickery, and what motivates him? Vickery is a longtime IT staffer. His recently left his full-time position at an Austin, TX, law firm, on good terms, to move to California. Because of his profession, Vickery possessed working knowledge of tools, such as Amazon S3 buckets and Rsync servers, which companies and agencies increasingly use to store copies of business documents. He also was familiar with Shodan, a search engine that finds and indexes computing devices connected to the internet, such as smartphones, webcams, power plant controls, routers and servers, including servers that lack minimum safeguards, such as a password. Working in his free time from his home in Austin and using his personal computer, Vickery began hunting for unprotected data as sort of a hobby. He realized, of course, that anyone else, including those with criminal intent, could be in the hunt for the same things he was looking for. So he adopted a personal policy of notifying organizations of any major exposures he found, giving them the opportunity to rectify the oversight. “It feels good to find a million log-ins and know that I helped this company shut this down, and these million people aren’t going to have to worry their email address is being stolen, or their Social Security number is getting out there or something else bad is happening to them.” Vickery says. “I can imagine my grandmother getting caught up in something like this. And if I can prevent something happening to somebody else’s grandmother, it’s a nice thing to do.” In January, Vickery announced a partnership with MacKeeper — an international IT investment and development company — to establish “the best security and privacy practices.” Vickery assists with security auditing, discovers potential cyber threats, provides solutions for future vulnerabilities and writes a blog about security and data breaches. Locking down data not a priority In an environment where companies amass mountains of data, while also looking to reduce data storage and handling expenses, poor security practices have become the rule, Vickery says. Typically, an organization might have its live production database up and running in real time but might also need to have a backup version available for the IT staff to tinker with — troubleshooting, testing new techniques and the like. “The developer team takes a copy of the live production data and puts it in a development server,” Vickery says. “But for convenience sake, or because of a mistake, they’ll forget or just simply not put a password on it.” Vickery emphasizes that he is not a “hacker,” in any technical sense. He is simply conducting internet searches using free tools anyone can learn to master and then using human intellect to connect the dots. See also: A Renaissance, or Just Upheaval?   “I’ll find this staging server or development server, and because it has a full copy of the live production data in it, it might as well be the live production database; it’s got all the data in it,” he says. Other unprotected information Vickery has found on the internet includes registration information of voters in the U.S. and Mexico, Social Security numbers for millions of people and at least 10 law firms’ client files. Vickery estimates that he spends at least 30 hours per week “crawling around the far corners of the internet looking for unsecured data troves.” He concludes that companies’ sloppiness about data protection can be shortsighted. “I think that companies seem to be so careless because less security equals more profit,” he says. “Worrying about good security requires hiring the right people and being willing to not only pay those people, but also to allocate budget funds for their software and appliances.” Security, Vickery says, “also slows down the research and development process. Many companies appear unwilling to give up the first-to-market advantage just for the sake of security.” This article original appeared on ThirdCertainty. ThirdCertainty’s Gary Stoller contributed to this story.

Convergence is emerging as the key theme for 2017.

As insurers continue major initiatives, launch new ones and respond to the external forces acting on the industry, the strategies are increasingly overlapping and becoming mutually dependent. On one hand, traditional challenges and related strategies are not going away. Insurers have a business to run every day -- the management of their products in the market, customers requiring service and regulators and shareholders/members monitoring progress. On the other hand, the digital, connected world is full of new opportunities, but at the same time gives rise to some new and credible threats. Insurtech, emerging technologies and innovative products and business models create more pressure to change but also produce new ways to compete and generate new strategic initiatives.

The insurance industry is in the throes of transformation, with almost half of North American insurers stating that their companies are in transformation mode. At the same time, many are realizing that the pace of change within their companies is not matching the pace outside their company. Customer expectations, the digital world, emerging technologies and the disruption of other industries are putting more pressure on insurers to rethink and reposition their businesses. Interestingly, customer expectations have now been elevated to the point of becoming the number one driver of technology investments.

See also: CES2017: Cool Stuff, Insurance Implications  

One of the key findings of our recent research on strategic initiatives for 2017 is that digital is gaining more momentum than any of the 16 initiatives we have been tracking. Strategies to become a digital insurer have now reached a high penetration in the industry, with 72% of insurers now claiming that they have this initiative underway.

Another set of findings is that traditional initiatives, such as enterprise data/analytics and customer experience, continue to be highly important, while new initiatives such as insurtech investments, digital distribution ventures and greenfield insurers are starting to pick up. These initiatives do not occur in isolation; in fact, there are significant dependencies among the initiatives. Thus, the reshaping of the industry is more likely to be the result of blending the best of the old with the best of the new. This is the notion of convergence.

While tackling 16 major enterprise initiatives seems daunting for an individual company, each insurer will identify a subset that will be most important for them. Almost all the initiatives will have some role, but the priorities will differ based on current market position, business strategy, resources and funding. One way to prepare for the future is to create plans to address foundational capabilities. SMA has defined seven bridges to the future, or initiatives that represent pathways upon which insurers can build transformation strategies critical to becoming a Next-Gen Insurer, such as Go Digital, Major in Data and Analytics and Operationalize Customer Experience.

More information on these seven bridges can be found in SMA’s research report, Insurance in Transformation: Building 7 Bridges to the Future.

See also: 5 Topics to Add to Your List for 2017  

For insights on insurer plans and strategies for the 16 strategic initiatives, see the recently released report, Insurers’ 2017 Strategic Initiatives: The Convergence of Traditional and New Initiatives.

Now that I have your undivided attention. Justice Potter Stewart famously said during a pornography case before the U.S. Supreme Court: " I know it when I see it” (Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964.) The same can be said about insurance coverage porn. Since the idea of insurance coverage porn may be new, let me explain. I define it as creating a fanatic view of insurance coverage. An over-the-top, exaggerated, excitedly hyped or false illusion designed to distract, distort and divert attention from reality. The result is to leave sanity and common sense about coverage at the door. Here are four examples that I’d like to explore: 1. Performing “Unnatural Acts” With Coverage This is where someone tries to make a policy say, do or cover something that it was never intended to. While there are many different people and organizations who dabble in this type of insurance coverage porn, the real addicts are third parties. They require insureds and agent/brokers to include language on certificates of insurance to give them both additional money and assurance that they will be paid and paid first. Sometimes these unnatural acts require additional language on the certificate that is in direct conflict with the policy, not to mention insurance theory or regulation. In many of these cases, the insured is at the mercy of the third party. Construction can be held up waiting for specific language or punctuation. A subcontractor cannot start work or get paid till the third party is completely satisfied. Truck drivers cannot go onsite until the certificate is signed off. The simple fact is that the policy is a contract. It is what it is, and no amount of finagling on the certificate will change it. The certificate itself has a warning in CAPITALIZED BOLD print saying that it is informational only and does not amend the policy. Asking it to perform “unnatural acts” is insurance coverage porn, leading everyone to frustration, wasted time, energy and money. See also: Jurors and Questions on Insurance Coverage   2. The Big Tease, a.k.a. The Image Has Been Enhanced for Your Entertainment and Enjoyment Many of our daily tasks and jobs require insurance. To drive a car, you need proof of insurance. To sell insurance, you need insurance. You need proof of insurance to renew many types of licenses. Yet all you need is a piece of paper that says there is insurance. When I walk into the DMV to renew my vehicle registration, all I need is a driver ID card that says I have insurance. To use the auditorium or gym at the local high school, all you need is a piece of paper that says you have coverage. If you need to show proof of insurance to perform some kind of work, all you need is a completed form. And the best, or worst, part is that most organizations requiring proof of insurance now tell you exactly what they need on their website. Now I know that this is done to be helpful, but it actually becomes a by-the-numbers “how to” guide to potentially perpetrate fraud. Some of these websites provide step-by-step instructions on what form they require, what numbers they need in specific fields, what wording is to be included. It is beyond simple to Google and find all sorts of proof of insurance documents. Certificates, driver ID cards, company specific forms, you name it. Find the form, follow the web site instructions and you’re good to go. One enterprising insured needed to provide annual proof of insurance for the coming calendar year. Taking the current forms, the insured employed Wite-Out to hide the dates and typed in new dates. The form was accepted, until an expert noticed that one of the forms had been out of use for a long time. This insured had actually been using Wite-Out for a number of years. It worked last year; let’s try it again.... Providing a form to prove insurance is one thing, but some organizations require even less. Some only ask that you check a box indicating that you have the appropriate insurance. The bar can be set even lower. One executive told me that while his insurance agency relationship demands that he purchase E&O insurance, the executive’s organization does not ask for any proof or indication that insurance is in place. The organization simply assumes that it exists. I wondered if this is the insurance equivalence of, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” 3. Coverage Cover-Up, a.k.a. I Buy the Magazines for the Articles, Not the Pictures Insurance applications used to be on paper. This meant that agents and the insured wrote down information for carrier personnel to rate/quote policies. Agents and insureds could not repetitively manipulate information, trying to get a better price without a paper trail. Today, both agents and insured have direct access to websites and carrier systems to speed quoting, eliminate paper and reduce cost. Now, no one in their right mind is suggesting going back to paper applications, but think about what is now possible. Whoever is entering information has the opportunity to “tweak” amounts and drop down selections, options and other information to reduce the premium. Unless the software prevents repeated updates, it’s like giving the user an unlimited number of pulls on a slot machine until the right number comes up. One agent was trying to insure a very nice log cabin home for his customer. You know, the ones pictured in magazine ads. But his traditional insurance carriers would not accept the risk, which was outside normal underwriting guidelines. Finally, out of frustration and needing to get the house insured, the agent changed the construction type from “log” to “frame.” The risk was accepted, and a policy was issued. Later, the home caught fire and burned to the ground. You can imagine the claims adjuster’s surprise, expecting to see the remains of a frame house. Regardless of whether the insured properly stated what the construction type was, the agent knew, so the carrier paid the resulting $540,000 loss. This payment was immediately followed by a claim against the agent under his E&O policy. 4. Scantily Clad Coverage Cover-Up, a.k.a. Bait and Switch Having an agent manipulate information is one thing, but giving direct data entry to the insured opens up greater opportunities for insurance coverage porn. One study confirms that 51% of insureds are willing to misrepresent their insurance information to get a better personal auto price. Think about that for a moment. What other industry has a business model where more than half of their customers admit to not telling the truth? Here’s another example. Anonymous national surveys find that about 16% of the general population smokes. So how come, on health and life insurance policy applications, only 7% record that they smoke? Health insurance carriers charge 50% more for individuals who use tobacco on a regular basis. Everyone knows that they have a better chance of being accepted, and getting a lower premium, if they deviate from the truth. This is insurance coverage porn. See also: Broad Array of Roles for Disability Coverage With their desire to make writing policies easy for consumers, carriers have invested significant time, energy and dollars into their web sites and mobile apps. And while they are to be congratulated for making insurance more accessible, one unintended consequences is that applicants may be able to manipulate data to reduce the price. Justice Stewart may have known it when it saw it, but that isn't enough in insurance, where we need to exercise leadership within our organizations and throughout the insurance community. The “we’ve always done it this way” attitude is an open invitation for another person, another organization to take our customers, marketplace position and distribution channels.

In the pundit scramble following the 2016 presidential election, I heard a commentator say the electorate could be divided into two distinct groups: those who have benefited from the technical revolution and those who have not. While we know the outcome of a national election is based on a variety of complex factors, history provides plenty of examples of workers left behind in the wake of technical advances. Clerks and scribes lost their niches after the invention of the printing press; textile mills displaced weavers; and steel manufacturing plants that once employed thousands can now be run with a few hundred managing the automated processes. Today, few jobs do not involve technology at some level. We’ve innovated nearly everything, and we continue to update with the speed of the next idea. For technology companies, in particular, the search for talented staff is becoming increasingly difficult. It’s not breaking news that there’s a shortage of workers with software and programming skills in the U.S. In September 2015, Fortune reported that there are 1.42 tech jobs for each worker. This statistic is exacerbated by the fact that skilled tech job seekers are reportedly 3.6 times more interested in working in tech hubs like San Francisco, San Jose, Austin and Seattle — not reassuring for those of us in other geographies. What’s alarming is the overwhelming lack of creativity in the face of this talent shortage. At a recent national technology and innovation conference, I listened to a panel focused on recruiting and retaining top female technical talent. I found it surprising that panel members were not enthusiastic about the benefits of encouraging career changers to enter the technical field. The panelists’ view was very traditional: go to a top-tier program like MIT or Stanford and get a technical degree. That view may work for Amazon and Google, but it is not particularly realistic for a small company recruiting tech talent in the Midwest. See also: All Insurers Must Become Insurtechs   Career changers are a valued resource pool In NIPR’s Java shop in Kansas City — where we build and support software for the insurance industry — we are pursuing a different (and, I would argue, more innovative) recruitment path. We compete with large national telecom and tech companies for architects, developers and automated testing experts, and we have found that career changers have provided us with some of our top talent. We have hired former welders, medical researchers, math teachers and Marines. They now build software, run our scrum teams and provide production support for our customers. It would be overstatement to suggest that this successful talent recruitment approach was a result of leadership's foresight and brilliance. Rather, we benefited from strong employee recruitment and retention programs and a bit of luck. Through a vigorous internship program, many of today’s technical staff members started out in entry-level positions in customer support areas. All — and this is where the luck comes in — were logical thinkers, problem solvers and hard workers who were open to trying new things. A common theme among our career changers is that their path to a technology career was less intentional than you might expect. Few saw the career path ahead. Rather, as one of our team members said, “I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I was willing to take a low-level job to get in the door.” Demystifying technology jobs and “growing” technical talent Software development and technology jobs are shrouded in an aura of mystery, often appearing inaccessible and likely preventing smart, capable people from ever considering technical careers. NIPR — with luck and good recruitment — has demystified tech jobs for career changers. We know from experience that great technical talent can be grown. One of our talented software developers has a unique perspective that gives clarity and a “common sense” dimension to his technology work. As a former union welder and Walmart employee, his seems an unlikely path to a tech career. But that’s not how he sees it. “I’ve always had the same job, I’ve just used different tools to get the work done. Whether moving freight at Walmart, moving steam through pipes as a welder or pushing code into production, I am doing the same thing. I have to keep things moving, find the road blocks and fix them. Whether data, freight or steam, my job is to keep it moving seamlessly to the customer.” NIPR’s willingness to take a risk on career-changers has also netted staff members who typically have well-established work habits, understand collaborative work environments and, as one of our mangers put it, come to the job “more fully formed.” These are people who are adaptable to change — a constant in a technical environment. An added benefit: Career-changers bring a level of excitement to their role, adding energy and value across the company. See also: 3 Major Areas of Opportunity   With an appreciation of the rewards that career-changers bring to our workplace, we are now trying to turn luck into strategy. We are looking for smart, creative, hard-working, engaged thinkers who are willing to learn. NIPR’s strong tuition reimbursement program and a recently added student loan contribution plan help build skills and improve retention. The next step is a stronger in-house training program and a mentoring program that will help provide an even more supportive environment for career changers. One of NIPR’s team leaders summed it up nicely: “Support from others is key to everyone’s success. We see it as part of the job to transfer knowledge and help others succeed. That’s a win for all of us.”

Silicon Valley exports technology and imports the world’s best talent. That is how it has helped grow America’s economy and boosted its competitive advantage. President Trump’s executive order banning immigrants from some Muslim countries sent shock waves through the tech industry over the weekend because it was a loud and clear message to the world that America’s doors are now closed, and that xenophobia and bigotry are the new rules of law. It is no wonder that executives at almost every major technology company, including Alphabet, Facebook and Apple, have made statements defending immigrants and distancing their companies from the president. These companies are worried about their survival and the future of the country. Let there be no doubt that immigrants are essential to our economic present and future. These newcomers start a disproportionate number of U.S. businesses, particularly in advanced technologies. Immigrants and foreign-passport holders occupy a growing majority of places in graduate education programs in computer science, mathematics, physics and other hard sciences. They play an outsize role in U.S. research and innovation. See also: An Open Letter to the Trump Administration   A 2012 research paper I co-wrote, “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Then and Now,” documented that 24% of U.S. engineering and technology startup companies and 44% of those based in Silicon Valley were founded by immigrants. My research also determined that immigrants contributed to more than 60% of the patent filings at innovative companies such as Qualcomm, Merck, General Electric and Cisco Systems. And surprisingly, more than 40% of the international patent applications filed by the U.S. government had foreign-national authors. Study after study has found that immigrants are more likely to start job-creating businesses, not only in tech but across the economy. In 2014, 20% of the Inc. 500 companies had immigrant founders. That’s despite immigrants accounting for less than 15% of the U.S. population. According to research by economist Robert Fairlie for the Small Business Administration, immigrants are more than twice as likely to found businesses as non-immigrants, and 7.1% of immigrant-founded businesses export their products outside the U.S. as compared with only 4.4% of non-immigrant-founded businesses. Clearly, blocking the path of immigrants into the U.S. cuts off the exact economic growth serum that has made America great. Creating an atmosphere where immigrants are fearful and uncertain about their future will reduce their incentives to open businesses here and stay. This is becoming even more so as other countries increasingly court educated immigrants and entrepreneurs. Those who support the president’s executive order say that the intent is to block people from countries where terrorism is sourced. But it’s not so simple. By blocking entrance based on passport or country of birth rather than objective criteria, the executive order paints all immigrants from those affected countries and possibly dual passport holders with the same scarlet letter. What if the next Mark Zuckerberg happens to be Iranian? Or if an Einstein happened to be born in Libya? Let’s not forget that Steve Jobs’s father was Syrian — and he would have been banned from entering the U.S. under Trump’s dictate. Yes, it is true that the affected countries are not the largest sources of immigrant entrepreneurs. But setting a precedent like this can mean that a politician can use this weapon against other countries that have become critical in supplying talent to fuel U.S. innovation. What if a frustrated president elected to block immigrants with Mexican, Chinese or Indian passports? The scenario, totally unthinkable a few months ago, is today entirely plausible. In my 2012 book, “The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent,” I documented the stories of numerous immigrant entrepreneurs who were forced to leave the country because of shortages of skilled immigrant visas, called green cards. It wasn’t that we didn’t want these people here; American politics was caught in a political quagmire on skilled immigration. As a result, the country began suffering a brain drain, with highly skilled foreign-born doctors, engineers and scientists returning home. With this executive order, Trump has made it clear that immigrants will have to worry about being singled out even after they have become lawful permanent residents; that their religion and place of birth may be the deciding factor in whether they are allowed to reenter the U.S. after going abroad. This will no doubt turn the trickle of skilled workers permanently leaving the country into a flood. Entrepreneurs who had wanted to come here will have now second thoughts. See also: What Will Trump Mean for State Regulation?   Whether or not the courts uphold the legality of the executive order, the damage has been done. Already, the number of billion-dollar technology startups, commonly called “unicorns,” that are located outside the U.. has been increasing dramatically. Fifteen years ago, almost all were in the U.S., while today 86 of the 191 unicorns are in countries such as China and India. We can expect this trend to accelerate because the Trump administration has just added fuel to the fire of innovation abroad and handicapped our own technology industry.

In the face of growing commoditization, carriers increasingly focus on innovation as they describe their development plans and go-to-market strategies. Recently, we spoke to 10 carriers from the Novarica Research Council spanning both the P&C and L&A segments. The insights and perspectives we gained provide a fascinating view of an industry facing significant changes in its markets, customer demographics and persistently low interest rates, which make outside-the-box thinking a necessity. Innovation is the father of disruption in the insurance industry, and that disruption is now coming from multiple directions simultaneously, so CIOs have their heads on a swivel. CIOS view the most significant source of innovation and disruption as coming from outside the industry—specifically, banking and financial services firms, which tend to require more rapid adoption of advancing technology. Within the industry, insurtech startups are the main sources of innovation, bringing ideas, technologies and processes from other verticals into insurance. See also: How to Master the ABCs of Innovation   When it comes to leveraging these perspectives for innovation, the P&C industry is further along than L&A. Many P&C CIOs have put together a combination of insurtech startups, customer experience designers from outside the industry and traditional management consultants to build capabilities. L&A CIOs are still largely looking for that sweet spot of combining outside and inside industry expertise to start getting their arms around what innovation means to them and their companies. Once a carrier has decided to incorporate innovation, CIOs have to make the move from conceptual to concrete by sponsoring formal activities that encourage creative thinking. While P&C carriers are, by and large, further along the innovation curve, L&A carriers appear to be making greater use of tools like hackathons and ideathons to foster a culture of innovation. Appointing an internal “innovation champion,” whether a person or a team, has become commonplace in L&A carriers. Innovation champions serve notice that innovation is a priority and that resources will be allocated accordingly. CIOs also have to consider a range of new technologies to support, and even to drive, their innovation efforts. Right now, AI-themed solutions like robo-advice apps are top of mind for CIOs. Wearable devices are more important for life insurers, while semi-autonomous vehicles and telematics are more important to P&C insurers. Drone-based technologies and data collection will continue to be important to both P&C and L&A insurers. Supporting innovation efforts can also mean recognizing the need to reach outside their own spheres of experience for help. A common approach is to create a venture capital entity separate from the core insurance business. Another approach is pursuing strategic alliances directly with insurtech startups or others, who might have the intellectual know-how, but not the resources and structure, to move ideas from concept to reality. Finally, some insurers are using “flanker” brands, which serve as alternatives to the traditional parent brand, as an entry into the innovation world. These can do things that the parent brand may not allow for. Like any other initiative, those focused on innovation need funding. L&A insurers favor the traditional budgeting route, and some have levied a corporate “tax” on other business units as a way to aggregate budge monies for innovation. The short-term risk here is that such an approach could cause political or cultural issues inside an insurer. P&C insurers, perhaps due to their having had more time in the innovation space, have found other ways to fund innovation initiatives. Some have gone so far as to carve out a whole separate innovation budget and create “innovation centers,” responsible for coming up with as many ideas as possible and turning the most promising ones around into prototypes quickly, without bureaucratic interference. In terms of investing in innovation, both P&C and L&A CIOs have discovered the power of investing in cultural change and adaptation, looking both inside and outside their organizations for inspiration and new ideas. Many have created innovation centers or loosely coupled investment funds to engage with startups, universities and think tanks. That trend is likely to accelerate as more insurers get serious about innovation. Understandably, insurers want to see that innovation is leading to new products, more effective and efficient processes, better customer service and, of course, higher profits. Along with that comes a desire to measure and quantify the effectiveness of innovation initiatives (measuring is simply what insurers do, after all). The industry, though, has yet to land on a quantitative and qualitative set of metrics to accurately gauge how successful an innovation project has been. Both P&C and L&A CIOs are for the most part still coming around to the idea that some innovation efforts can pay dividends without those dividends being directly measurable. See also: Where Will Real Innovation Start?   Innovation is becoming increasingly important to insurers in 2017, and it requires support from senior leadership to succeed. Insurance is an industry that is generally very conservative, and innovation is all too often looked at with skepticism, or even hostility. Innovation can be hard work that requires a dedication of resources and a willingness to take new risks. It can also require new organizational structures and an acceptance that an asset (e.g., a traditional brand) can also be a liability. Carriers simply cannot double down on the strategies from the past. Innovation is frequently about breaking things and a willingness to walk away from traditional approaches to products, distribution models and operations.

U.S. pollsters got quite a surprise in the early morning hours of Nov. 9, 2016. That’s when it became apparent that their sophisticated voter research had completely failed to predict the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.  Longtime Republican political strategist Mike Murphy went so far as to assert that “data died” that night. Yes, the 2016 U.S. presidential election was a highly visible casualty for data-driven research, but far from the only one. In 1985, Coca-Cola announced the rollout of “New Coke,” an updated formulation of the venerable soft drink, designed to appeal to changing consumer tastes. In launching the new formula, the company cited research indicating that taste was the primary driver behind the brand’s market share slide. The firm also pointed to blind taste tests that indicated that a majority of consumers favored New Coke over its predecessor (and over Pepsi). As it turns out, the research pointed Coca-Cola in the wrong direction. Three months after rolling the revised formulation out, the company acknowledged widespread public discontent and returned the original Coke to store shelves. New Coke was killed in 2002. See also: 5 Key Customer Experience Trends   What went wrong? One thing that Coca-Cola failed to account for was the emotional dimension of consumer buying behavior. Even if people said they preferred New Coke in taste tests, many had an emotional attachment to the original formula that – outside of the research bubble – superseded their rational judgment on taste. This is why an overreliance on traditional research methods (i.e., asking customers what they want or like) can lead a company astray. Surveys and questionnaires do a poor job of accounting for the emotional considerations that drive customer behavior. As behavioral science has clearly demonstrated, it’s those emotional considerations that often exert the strongest influence on individual decision-making. (As renowned psychologist Daniel Kahneman has described it, “the emotional tail wags the rational dog.”) Post-mortems on the 2016 election polling have also referred to the emotional “blind spot” of traditional research methods. Evans Witt, president of the National Council on Public Polls, highlighted this issue to NPR, noting that “polls do a poor job with emotion/enthusiasm/commitment”; that may have been an important behavioral influence on what was a very polarized electorate. There’s another reason, though, why traditional question-based customer research can mislead, and it comes down to this simple truth: There’s a big difference between what customers say and what customers do. Wal-Mart found this out the hard way in 2009 when it launched a store redesign effort dubbed Project Impact. The company had conducted customer surveys, which indicated that shoppers didn’t like Wal-Mart’s cluttered, dimly lit stores. They wanted cleaner, more streamlined layouts. Project Impact sought to deliver on this apparent customer preference by de-cluttering the store – removing endcaps, widening aisles and improving navigability. Even the store’s famed “Action Alley,” the main corridor separating departments, wasn’t immune to the changes. Traditionally dotted with palettes piled high with fast-selling items, Action Alley was cleared out by Project Impact, opening up sight lines across the entire store. It all sounded like a good idea… until same-store sales started to plummet. The reason? To streamline the store layout, Wal-Mart had to eliminate, by some estimates, 15% of its store inventory. When customers could no longer find their favorite brand at Wal-Mart, they went elsewhere to pick it up – and shifted their shopping to competing stores that offered a wider product selection. In addition, it turns out that Action Alley – while perhaps contributing to store clutter – also triggered a lot of impulse buys among Wal-Mart shoppers. When Action Alley disappeared, so did a lot of sales. Since its founding by Sam Walton in the 1960s, Wal-Mart’s strategy had always centered on offering low prices and a wide selection (“Stack ‘em high, watch ‘em fly,” as Sam liked to say). Sam apparently knew his customers better than the company’s modern researchers, because it turns out people shop at Wal-Mart for – you guessed it – value and selection. Shoppers might have said they wanted a clutter-free store – but in reality, the clutter was part of the appeal for them, feeding into their hunt for great deals and impulse purchases. What could Wal-Mart have done differently? Instead of just asking customers what they wanted, they should have observed them in action, navigating the store and making purchases. They should have spoken to shoppers one-on-one, to better understand what shaped their purchase behavior once they stepped foot into a Wal-Mart. It’s precisely this type of context and nuance that traditional customer research methods miss – because what customers say they want is sometimes quite different from what they actually value. Indeed, that which the customer values the most may also be the thing that’s hardest for them to articulate. Hence the mismatch between what people say and what people do. See also: Are You Ready for the New Customer?   Traditional customer research has merit, but its precision is often oversold. To steer your business in the right direction, don’t just look at the data, look at your customers. Immerse yourself in their experience and observe them in their natural habitat – because that’s where you’ll find the priceless insights about how to better serve them. This article first ran on WaterRemarks, the official blog of Watermark Consulting.

Our previous blogpost introduced the Top 10 insurtech trends for 2017. We received a lot of requests to share more of our view with regard to the last trend we mentioned: symbiotic relationships with insurtechs. Banks and insurers are looking for ways to learn much more from the fintechs and insurtechs they are investing in and partnering with. This is indeed a critical issue to accelerate innovation in banking and insurance. In our new book "Reinventing Customer Engagement: The next level of digital transformation for banks and insurers," we actually included seven best practices -- seven examples of banks and insurers that created very different ways of working with fintechs and insurtechs. (The book will be available Feb. 23, but you can already pre-order at Amazon). Corporate Venturing Virtually every bank and insurer is organizing competitions and hackathons or supports one or more accelerator programs. Some have started their own corporate venture arm. Obviously, corporate venturing should not be the main way for financial institutions to reinvent themselves. It is a means but not an end in itself. The challenge of the digital transformation is essentially a cultural one that involves the whole company, not just the technology. Working with fintechs and insurtechs offers the opportunity to rethink and accelerate innovation. Innovation is not about asking customers in focus groups what they want. It is about understanding new technologies and how they will interact with consumer behavior. And that is one of the things fintechs and insurtechs are much better at than incumbents. Therefore, financial institutions need to really immerse in the fintech community to stay on pace or maybe even a step ahead in a rapidly changing technology environment, or, better still, to shake up the status quo and accelerate change in the stagnant financial industry. [caption id="attachment_23815" align="alignnone" width="413"] Minh Q. Tran (AXA Strategic Ventures). Key note address at DIA Barcelona in 2016[/caption] Banks and insurers are looking for ways to learn much more from the fintechs and insurtechs they are investing in and partnering with -- whether it is about specific capabilities or concrete instruments they can use in the incumbent organization, or whether it is about the culture and the way of working. (At last year’s edition of our Digital Insurance Agenda, Minh Q. Tran, general partner at AXA Strategic Partners, and Moshe Tamir, global head of digital transformation at Generali, shared their view. Check here for the interview with Tamir. Obviously, expect more such keynotes addressing this critical issue at DIA Amsterdam, which will take place May 10-11, 2017.) We have come across quite a few different models in which relationships between financial institutions and fintechs/insurtechs seem to flourish. In this blogpost, we included seven examples. This is not meant to be exhaustive. New kinds of symbiotic relationships evolve every day, and of course they can be combined. 1. DBS Bank: Fintech Injections Neal Cross, chief innovation officer at DBS Bank, involves fintechs in his own distinctive way: “I don’t do innovation, I do sales. I sell programs that solve business problems inside the bank. We always start with their problems, around business model innovation or around KPIs. The start-up community plays a key role in our programs. I often tell our business units: 'Give us 20 of your staff, we will split them into teams and pair them with startups.' By embedding our staff in this agile, lean mean way of working, everyone benefits. We make sure our teams work within structured processes that include research, experimentation and prototyping, followed by implementation. Everything we do is focused, and we get senior sponsorship before embarking on a project, so we don’t have problems with innovations that end up not being implemented.” [caption id="attachment_23817" align="alignnone" width="372"] Neal Cross[/caption] 2. Aviva: Icons This is the best practice that we included in our previous blogpost. Andrew Brem, chief digital officer at Aviva: 'In our view, ‘icons’ are needed to spearhead the digital transformation process. Our digital garages in London and Singapore are such icons. They are a very concrete and visual manifestation of our digital journey - for everyone across Aviva. The garages are not just idea labs to house ‘skunk works’ teams. They are real places, where we make and break things. We run digital businesses from the Garages, and we design and build our digital ecosystems such as MyAviva. Anyone from Aviva is welcome to come and hold workshops and meetings there, to see and feel our digital capabilities at first hand. The garages also help us engage with insurtechs and inject their culture into our organization; by launching startups ourselves, but also by partnering, mentoring and investing. Aviva Ventures, with a fund of £100 million, is also housed in the garage, and so are some of the startups they invest in, such as the IoT home security startup Cocoon.” [caption id="attachment_23818" align="alignnone" width="418"] Aviva Garage, Shoreditch, London[/caption] 3. Deutsche Bank: Digital Factory In the summer of 2016, Deutsche Bank started its “digital factory.” More than 400 IT specialists and banking experts from the private, wealth and commercial clients division are working on a specific site in Frankfurt to develop new digital products and services for the bank's customers. In addition, there are 50 places for external partners from the fintech community. The digital factory is obviously also connected with the Deutsche Bank’s innovation labs in Berlin, London and Palo Alto CA. 4. Munich Re: Interfaces Andrew Rear, CEO of Munich Re Digital Partners: “To avoid a culture clash, we have set up a separate Digital Partners unit in 2016. To make the interface between the two worlds work, two things are vital: The first is speed. Startups move fast and don't accept the limitations of a corporate diary: 'Time is money' is literally true for them. We therefore need to move with the same sense of pace. The second is decision-making: Start-ups make decisions; they don’t arrange committees. Therefore, we don’t do that, either. All the key decisions from Munich Re’s side are in our hands. In our model we do the things startups don’t need to control, to make their proposition live. That can include policy administration, compliance, reporting and product pricing; the ‘boring insurance’ stuff. We have stakes in our start-up partners but we don’t interfere in the way they engage their customers. The positive effects on our ‘regular’ organization are noticeable. For example, people in compliance and risk management were not used to these new speeds but are already adapting and finding new ways to fulfill their responsibilities in a way that is manageable for the start-up." Example of an interface between Munich Re and startups at regional level is Mundi Lab. Mundi Lab is an accelerator partnership between Munich Re Iberia & Latin America and Alma Mundi Ventures. Augusto Diaz-Leante, senior vice president of Munich Re Life, Spain, Portugal and Latin America, explains how the cross-fertilization with startups works: “We select startups from all over the world, such as RiskApp from Italy and Netbee from Brazil. Twenty Munich Re executives mentor these startups one-on-one. The best-performing companies with the highest potential to disrupt the insurance industry have the opportunity to work on a pilot program in one of the Munich Re Iberia or Latin America markets. In this way, the sharing of knowledge, experience and expertise is made very concrete.” [caption id="attachment_23820" align="alignnone" width="406"] The Munich Re Mundi Lab team[/caption] 5. Zurich: Open Innovation Zurich created a platform to bring together the innovation initiatives and projects in the group. Xavier Tuduri, CEO of ServiZurich Technology Delivery Center: “In the Zurich Innovation Lab, we generate disruptive ideas and strategic R&D projects for the global Zurich group. We believe in open innovation, a collaborative model that means combining the internal knowledge, for example regarding markets with external talent and disruptive technologies. In this way we are always at the forefront of the latest disruptive fintech and insurtech developments, while being able to quickly develop tangible prototypes that fit and inspire our businesses. These are prototypes, without risky high investments, for example regarding using drones for risk assessment. Each prototype project is led by an employee of ServiZurich who works together in a team with several start-ups, universities and institutions. In this way, our people and organization get injected with new ways of working and thinking.” 6. Chebanica!: Co-Opetition If a financial institution wants to behave like a fintech, it needs to open up, think of what the ecosystem could look like, be at the forefront to see what is happening and partner with fintechs to accelerate innovation, to learn or to advance the sector as a whole. Roberto Ferrari (CheBanca!) is a protagonist of this mindset: “We believe in a ‘co-opetition’ model. There will be things in which we will be competing with fintechs and other banks, and areas where we will be cooperating with the same parties. Therefore, we try to make the Italian fintech community grow. Building a larger cake will be for the good of the whole financial ecosystem, innovation is key and startups will always be the lifeblood of any sector. We among others launched the Italian fintech awards and the Smartmoney blog, which is now the most important vertical innovation in banking blogs in Italy. We now have a very strong presence in the Italian fintech community, and we are close to all developments and connections. I and other C-level executives at our bank speak to at least five to six fintechs each week, and we have already launched two new services – award-winning Mobile Wallet and Robo Adviser -- thanks to our partnership with some specialized Italian fintech startups. We help them by partnering, but also we want to help them to go abroad as scale is key to succeed.” [caption id="attachment_23821" align="alignnone" width="376"] Roberto Ferrari (right) with Matteo Rizzi (left, one of the most influential fintech experts)[/caption] 7. Metlife: Capability Building Lee Ng, vice president and COO of LumenLab, MetLife's innovation center in Singapore: “LumenLab and our new businesses are distinct from MetLife’s core business. Our mission is to create a growth engine that launches disruptive new revenue-generating businesses for MetLife, targeting the needs of Asian consumers across health, aging and wealth. But we do work with in-country experts to develop plans for testing the new business ideas and assess market potential. In our first year we, for instance, launched BerryQ, a quiz app that rewards users for their health knowledge; Rememory Stories, a platform to capture intergenerational stories; and developed CONVRSE, virtual reality experiences around service and sales for financial services. We notice a real mindset shift within MetLife because of this cooperation. The people we work with develop skills about new ways of testing new ideas, new toolkits and new ways of thinking. Our core insurance business thus improves their performance, through adopting new behaviors like curiosity, velocity, experimentalism and bravery. In others words, we are lighting a path for innovation at MetLife.” [caption id="attachment_23822" align="alignnone" width="560"] MetLife’s LumenLab, Singapore[/caption] We believe that it will be increasingly important to adopt a culture of constant innovation, to stay in sync with all that is going on out there. Rather than trying to change their DNA, which is quite impossible, banks and insurers should think that constant innovation is the only way to adapt the DNA to the change that is taking place. You can, for example, buy great algorithms, but if you are not able to transform your culture, the implementation of these algorithms will fail. A banker shared with us: “I see working with fintechs like vaccinations in biology: these injections in our cytoplasm help us prepare ourselves for new attacks and adapt to changing environments. If you acquire new fintech companies, you could destroy them if you don't adapt to them as an organization. You have to adapt the mindset of your own people. It is like playing a piano. Some people sit down on their piano chair and move their chair to the piano. Other people don't want to change their position and try to pull the piano to their chair. We should therefore teach people to move their chair after sitting down. How to move the chair will depend upon the situation, but should always deliver value to our customers.” Working With Fintechs and Insurtechs at DIA Amsterdam Maximizing the results from working with insurtechs is an essential subject on the Digital Insurance Agenda. So definitely expect us to pay ample attention to this at DIA Amsterdam: our two-day conference connecting insurance executives with insurtech leaders. Check out www.digitalinsuranceagenda.com for more information.

2016 was definitely the year of cyber insurance emergence. As large-scale attacks and disclosures of massive data-breaches were recurring, we realized once again that allocating tremendous efforts and resources to your cybersecurity defense does not provide any guarantee you won’t experience an incident. Executives and security professionals are gradually accepting that it is not a matter of if but a matter of when their organization will be hit by a cyber-attack. With this understanding, many businesses acknowledge cyber insurance as an important tool in the multilayer cybersecurity defense approach and declare it is an essential part of their risk mitigation strategy. See also: 10 Cyber Security Predictions for 2017   Here are some of my personal predictions for the cyber insurance market this year:

1. An increasing number of security vendors will provide insurance guarantees. 2016 signaled a new path in the cybersecurity industry as few emerging startups started to offer a cyber insurance coverage of as much as $1 million per organization that will be fully covered with their defense solutions (e.g. SentinelOne and Cymmetria). I expect this trend to intensify through 2017, and well-established vendors will gradually follow to offer a bundle of protection plus insurance.
2. We will see an increase in the number of insurance companies that will start to offer cybersecurity services. As cyber insurance is emerging and as many new insurance companies are entering the market (currently, approximately 70 insurers offer stand-alone cyber insurance products), there is a race for the best cybersecurity talent to assess the risks and provide pre- and post-breach services as monitoring, incident response, forensics, etc. In this atmosphere, insurers will acknowledge the revenues they can make from cyber insurance and adjacent security services to their clients, and will (and already do) expand their teams with the cybersecurity professionals and tools through aggressive hiring and M&As.
3. Cyber extortion coverage will take the lead as the most demanded cyber insurance product. Ransomware is exploding across geographies, industries and all sizes of businesses. Following the massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Krebs on Security and Dyn, the IoT world is open to a new world of DDoS attacks that no load balancer can mitigate. I expect that cyber extortion will become the biggest problem for organizations and individuals and that it will surpass data breaches as the main threat.
4. Adoption of advanced tools for risk assessment will increase. There is a high demand for tools that will give insurers an accurate, scalable and affordable risk assessment that will streamline the entire (mainly manual) questionnaire-based risk quantification methodology that is the common practice today.
5. New regulations will be introduced and will support the expansion of the cyber insurance market. There are high chances that more U.S. states will introduce regulations that support internal risk assessments on a regular basis of third party vendors and enforce security policies on organizations as suggested by the new NY proposal for the big financial institutes that was released last September.
6. The penetration rate of cyber insurance among SMBs will be the driving force in the industry. As awareness of cyber-attacks increases among small- and medium-sized business, they'll realize that cyber insurance is an essential security tool, particularly because of their limited cybersecurity resources. I expect to witness higher percentages of the SMB segment that will purchase cyber insurance coverage, leading to an increase in total market size, as current estimates rely on low adoption rates in these segments.
7. Insurers will introduce personal cyber insurance coverage. As ransomware becomes a threat to any operating system and any device, it is forecasted that it will gradually become a serious problem for individuals, as well, and will lead cyber insurance companies to offer personal cyber insurance coverage.

Cyber insurance is here to stay, and insurers, brokers, business and individuals will benefit as this market continues to evolve. Growth will be sustained mainly in the U.S. market and is highly likely to expand worldwide, especially in the EU as GDPR starts to be effective. See also: Understand the Nuts and Bolts of Cyber No matter which part of the IT security eco-system you fit into, you should explore the benefits cyber insurance can bring to you — revenues, financial hedge and cyber peace of mind.

Dentistry was painless, And bicycles were chainless, Carriages were horseless And many laws enforceless. Then, cooking was fireless, Radio was wireless, Cigars were nicotineless, And coffee caffeineless. Soon, oranges were seedless, The putting green was weedless, Men were going hatless, The proper diet fatless. New paved roads are dustless, The latest steel is rustless, Our tennis courts are sodless, And new religions godless. Marketing is feckless -- Everything is "pay less" -- Payment is money-less; Is the value worth less? Internet access is endless, Display screens are CRT-less. Online storage is diskless, And tech support is faceless Insurance policies are paperless, Policy exclusions are defenseless, Underwriting is relentless -- Has insurance become humanless?