Our contributors for this part took on the brief of imagining the InsurTech futurescape with real gusto. Six writers from around the world present their interpretations and visions of what’s in store, and, for us, the variety of perspectives here is almost as fascinating as the chapters themselves.

For Ulrich Kleipass, it is obvious that innovation in insurance is far from new – but what is new is how the sector is no longer totally inward looking, but actively externally focused (on partners, customers, and even peers) to get innovation and digitalization done. This makes getting “external innovation management” right absolutely critical, and Kleipass offers up a practical eight-point action plan for insurer incumbents to do just that.

Pauline Davies’ powerful arguments for the new world of “connected customer” to actually mean the acceleration of microinsurance hit home. Davies’ detailed analysis of the current state of non-insurance, especially in Africa, and examination of how digitalization and InsurTech can change this situation is down-to-earth yet inspiring. Many will feel that enabling microinsurance is, of itself, a rationale for InsurTech worth rallying around.

The third piece in this part comes from Ming Chiu and Yawei Cui. They analyse the future of InsurTech as a means of both “demand-side”, i.e. customer, understanding and control, and “supply-side” innovation, i.e. providers having fully applied Big Data and AI to internal structures and efficiencies. Chiu and Cui propose a Personal Asset Liability Management System encompassing every type of insurance (health, P&C, etc.), as well as personal finance, wealth management advisory, and execution.

No consideration of InsurTech futures would have been complete without a discussion of social media, and Erik Abrahamsson unsurprisingly writes engagingly and persuasively of two possible outcomes for the future of insurance through this lens: Skyscanners and Netflix representing his “worst-” and “best-case” scenarios, respectively, and ZhongAn as the exemplar for the successful social media-enabled insurance company of the future. (He does not say which scenario he believes most likely: see what you think.) A common thread for all our contributors (not just for this part but throughout The InsurTech Book) is that InsurTech is really not all about technology, but much more about what you do with it – and why.

Mindset shift is also the key to Gilad Shai’s “take” on the future. He envisions incumbents (early adopters, fast followers and all) choosing not to solve “the technology issue” themselves, instead re-imagining insurance as “Insurance-as-a-Service”, i.e. risk services delivered in partnership with specialized, tech-enabled partners (InsurTechs).

Insurance professionals in the UK will recognize some of Shai’s examples of what this might mean as “Schemes” by another name – the UK broker has historically been valued for being specialized in finding new risks, and new customers for those new risks, and working with insurers to productize protection quickly but Shai is really challenging us to view InsurTechs not simply as useful, a necessary evil, or even an unavoidable threat. His challenge to incumbents is to make InsurTech partners a core part of your business, an Opportunity and a Strength in the ubiquitous SWOT analysis. Shai does not have the space to consider how InsurTech startups, fired up as many are with the urgent desire to disrupt or destroy the status quo, should view his ideas, or how they would shape their own offerings and approach. Perhaps next time?

And finally, George Kesselman’s rich and informative piece takes us to January 2029, and our monthly Life Backup Bill, detailing the payment required for this month’s activities, our precisely calibrated and costed individual “riskiness”, and consequent usage of Life Backup protection across every aspect of our lives. This is a tour de force of sustained argument, and whether or not you find Kesselman’s future personally appealing, all readers will find this contribution thought-provoking and a most original take on the “insurance as a utility” idea. Taken as a whole, this part weaves strands and ideas that feel simultaneously known and unfamiliar; logical and infeasible; obvious and inspired. A fitting completion, then, to a volume dedicated to InsurTech at this stage in its evolution.