Insurance Startup Uses Behavioral Science To Keep Customers Honest (fastcompany.com)

tedlistens quotes a report from Fast Company: Insurance startup Lemonade won itself headlines in January with the boast that it had successfully approved a claim in just three seconds. In that time, Lemonade's software had run 18 anti-fraud algorithms and sent a payment to the lucky customer's bank account -- a process that would have taken a traditional property and casualty insurer days, if not weeks. But it's what happened before Lemonade's artificial intelligence kicked into gear that makes the renegade insurer so potentially disruptive to this trillion-dollar industry, for which premiums alone comprise 7% of U.S. GDP. The customer, Brooklyn educator Brandon Pham, opened Lemonade's mobile app, signed an "honesty pledge" to attest to the truth of his claim, and then recorded a short video explaining that his Canada Goose parka, worth nearly $1,000, had been stolen. That deceptively simple claims process is the byproduct of academic research on psychology and behavioral economics conducted by Dan Arielyblog, one of the field's most prominent voices and Lemonade's chief behavioral officer. "There's a lot of science about when people behave and misbehave that has not been put to use," says Lemonade cofounder and CEO Daniel Schreiber. Lemonade is even applying behavioral science to itself, publishing unusually transparent blog posts that include data on customer growth, bank account balances, and more.

Comments

misleading numbers

[lucm]

potentially disruptive to this trillion-dollar industry, for which premiums alone comprise 7% of U.S. GDP

Those insurance startups don't disrupt the trillion-dollar insurance industry any more than hotels.com disrupt the business of Hilton or Starwood. This is not at all a situation similar to Airbnb or Uber. For the most part these startups are simply an additional revenue stream for the big companies, allowing them to reach out to the low-end market without having to foot the bill for all the automation and streamlining required to turn a profit on policies with a razor-thin margin.

Traditional insurance companies don't make the bulk of their profit by charging more in premiums than they pay in claims; they make a profit by investing those premiums until the moment where the money goes back to policy holders as claims are submitted. Insurance companies will never be made obsolete by the small peddlers; they will however go out of business if the financial system keeps making low-risk investments worth less than inflation. The disruption here comes from the retards at the Federal Reserve who keep handing taxpayers money for free to Wall Street banks; Lemonade is just an iPhone version of a traditional insurance broker.