The value of sharing: Branding and behaviour in a life and health insurance company

Abstract

As Big Data, the Internet of Things and insurance collide, so too, do the best and the worst of our futures. Insurance is summoned as an example of the interference in our private lives that is already underway everywhere. In this paper, we pause to reflect on this argument. Can changes in the way insurance measures the value of behaviour really serve as an example of the individual and social harms of datafication? How do we know? Insurance is a mathematical relationship staged between individuals and groups, between risk and uncertainty, between distribution and assessment, between the value of sharing and the sharing of value. We use the case study of Discovery International, owner of Vitality, the market leading brand in behavioural insurance to consider how behaviour is being branded and how the brand behaves.

Editorial: The personalisation of insurance: Data, behaviour and innovation

“…These financial arrangements are important to understanding the technical and commercial challenges of disrupting traditional insurance in the direction of more 'microscopic', personalised risk assessment. They also hint at how intricately linked the technical and sentimental valuations of risk are in insurance (Jeanningros and McFall, 2020;McFall, 2014).…”

“…aggregated search engine data including credit checks, license details, claims discount databases, price comparison website quote); social media data and connected device data. This means that insurers have a far, far greater range of 'behavioural' data sources than connected devices to draw upon and even connected device data is more nuanced in their application than the idea of behavioural pricing suggests (see Jeanningros and McFall, 2020;Meyers, 2018;Meyers and Hoyweghen, 2020). Credit information, for example, has been used to price motor and home insurance for several years despite its potential for proxy discrimination (Kiviat, 2019;Prince and Schwarcz, 2020).…”

AI: Coming of age?

“…So, AI is starting to impact every step of the insurance workflow: from underwriting and regulation to claims (Lloyd's Innovation Team, 2019). As discussed in McFall et al (2020), , Jeanningros & McFall (2020), there has been some academic analysis of how insurance practices are changing to incorporate new data sources such as wearable sensors, telematics devices, or on-line information but more work is needed. Customers are wary about what uses their personal, confidential information might be put to, what effect self-tracking, interactive schemes might have on the accessibility or affordability of insurance.…”

Critical insurance studies: Some geographic directions

“…However, the historic lineage of risk classification and pricing suggests that this is unlikely, as these have long been co-constituted through a diversity of non-scientific logicsaffective, emotional, material (McFall and Moor, 2018). Insurtech, rather than being a definitive transformation, will likely co-produce insurance that resonates with both historic and novel social complexities as it is mobilised by insurers through, for example, 'sentimental appeal' in personalised insurance product branding (Jeanningros and McFall, 2020) and enters the homes and lives of policyholders.…”