Insurers must embrace social media to woo Generation Y

The way in which insurance companies operate is the polar opposite of Generation Y (millennials), a generation synonymous with technology and social media.

That’s not a good thing—although millennials now account for the largest generation in western history (16.2 million in the UK alone) and pose a great market opportunity, they’re just not engaged with the insurance market.

These are the thoughts of Erik Abrahamsson, founder of Digital Fineprint, one of more than 20 start-ups attending the annual Intelligent InsurTECH conference on October 3 in London. Click here to find out more.

Consultancy company Gallups carried out a web panel survey and found that 69 percent of millennials said they are actively disengaged or indifferent with their insurance provider.

“Because of all this, we need to help insurers create engaging tools that millennials and other digital users can grasp,” said Abrahamsson.

One way to engage is social media.

Abrahamsson explained: “Today, a person’s data has been uploaded to several social media accounts. But this data is not accessible to insurance companies, despite the value inherent in the data itself.”

And because of this, insurers have trouble selling online and can’t preselect the customers it wants to target.

Digital Fineprint makes it “possible for insurers to connect to their customers’ social media identities, and generate actionable insights based on that information”.

Abrahamsson added that he is seeing a “positive shift” of insurers starting to use social media, and a number have reached out to the start-up to ask for help to “effectively use and understand the data from social media profiles”.

But it’s not all plain sailing and there are some pitfalls to avoid.

In November last year, Facebook blocked part of UK motor insurer Admirals’ new app, because of its plans to “analyze the personalities and habits of potential customers via their Facebook posts, using the data to determine the price of the policy”.

“This is different to the way Digital Fineprint uses social media as we make objective decisions on data points such as age, location and job titles. We also do most of our work on commercial lines of data, i.e. looking at data about companies and not about individuals,” added the start-up founder.

Abrahamsson worked in Twitter’s strategy team, seeing firsthand how the use of social media data was impacting many industries such as retail, hospitality and travel.

But the impact was not being seen in the insurance industry at all, he claimed, although the more he learned about insurance, the more he realized that the same techniques and analytics tools could be used.

According to Abrahamsson, Digital Fineprint is the first to develop proprietary algorithms around social media data specifically for the insurance industry.

“Our algorithms are developed specifically to analyze social media data and produce useful insights for insurers regarding risk, needs, and other customer traits. We already have strong relationships with several large insurers, and patent pending status on our product,” he added.

Abrahamsson is confident that, in two years’ time, Digital Fineprint will be a global technology provider working with some of the leading insurers in the world.

Digital Fineprint is one of more than 20 insurtech startups attending Intelligent Insurer’s Intelligent InsurTECH conference on October 3 in London. Click here to find out more.

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