The INSURTECH Book

From Event-Focused Insights to Coaching

By Benjamin Von Euw

Enterprise Architect, iA Financial Group

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, insurance is defined as the agreement, between two parties, in which the insured pays a company money to gain access to security, and the company pays the costs if the insured suffers an accident, sustains injury, or endures loss. This, by default, means the event has happened, or is occurring randomly rather than according to plan. Whether you’re talking about life insurance or Property & Casualty (P&C), individual or group insurance, insurers collect premiums and issue unilateral contracts that will be executed if a random event occurs. The traditional business model relies on random facts and events, but are they truly random or just out of control today?

Traditional Insurance Business Relies on Lack of Knowledge

For centuries, humans believed in spontaneous generation, coherently synthesized by the well-respected Aristotle. Aristotle explains that lives generate spontaneously from non-living sources such as a piece of tissue. However, in 1859, thanks to a more rigorous experiment, Louis Pasteur inhibited bacterial growth and proved that life wasn’t generated spontaneously from non-living sources. Biogenesis, the generation of life from existing life, was born. Later we discovered that it was much more efficient to heal people by giving them a pill than performing bloodletting; which human characteristics were transmitted from parent ...