Who, or what, is insurtech personalizing?: persons, prices and the historical classifications of risk

McFall, Liz; Moor, Liz

doi:10.1080/1600910x.2018.1503609

Cited by 53 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…The insurtech, sometimes rendered as insuretech, neologism refers, broadly speaking, to the appearance of market entrants and processes originating in the tech industries cf. McFall and Moor (2018). 5.…”

Section: The Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2020

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The adoption of Big Data analytics (BDA) in insurance has proved controversial but there has been little analysis specifying how insurance practices are changing. Is insurance passively subject to the forces of disruptive innovation, moving away from the pooling of risk towards its personalisation or individualisation, and what might that mean in practice? This special theme situates disruptive innovations, particularly the experimental practices of behaviour-based personalisation, in the context of the practice and regulation of contemporary insurance. Our contributors argue that behaviour-based personalisation in insurance has different and broader implications than have yet been appreciated. BDAs are changing how insurance governs risk; how it knows, classifies, manages, prices and sells it, in ways that are more opaque and more extensive than the black boxes of in-car telematics.

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Section: The Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2020

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“…However, while banks typically have only access to senders’ account transactions, that is, where, when, how much was paid, non-bank regulated payment services can also generate data detailing the networks of connections between senders and recipients—and link those connections back to data points from online platforms and their ecologies. These large amounts of individually and relationally produced digital data points then are used in corporate analyses to yield aggregated and patterned preferences, for personalized recommendations, targeted marketing, credit scoring (Kear, 2017), insurances (McFall and Moor, 2018), and even prices (Moor and Lury, 2018). Certainly, monetary transactions and products purchased have been recorded and analyzed for many decades, yet the digital data produced in digital payments are “qualitatively and quantitatively different” than before (O’Dwyer, 2019: 8).…”

Section: Payments: Infrastructures and Digital Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Unlocking the payment experience: Future imaginaries in the case of digital payments

Mützel

2021

New Media & Society

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This article explores sociotechnical imaginaries of digital payments. Drawing on a decade of reports from industry consultants, the analysis of stories on digital payments identifies three sociotechnical imaginaries that shape the banking and payment industry: data monetization, the growth of digital payments, and the payment experience. The article argues that these imaginaries have contributed to the banking industry’s move toward becoming payment platforms, which restructure financial services based on a “re-personalization of money.” In effect, digital payments play a central part in the current economic transformation, led and promoted by global tech giants, that builds on the tracking, production, categorization, and classification of digital data. The article zooms in on recent and current expectations and imaginaries in the banking industry that, in the short run, shape economic decisions, while, in the long run, are set out to change how people interact, and how they are tracked, scored, and categorized.

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“…Solidaristic elements persist even within a predominantly privatized insurance system. Insurance is solidaristic because it transforms entities into grouped, risk-bearing categories (McFall & Moor, 2018; Meyers & Van Hoyweghen, 2018). Risk has to be grouped because it cannot be calculated at an individual level.…”

Section: Concepts and Organized Practices Of Solidaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Research on how this challenge is being handled in insurance is scant, notwithstanding the frequency with which insurance is invoked as an exemplar of the privacy, surveillance and societal concerns raised by big data. There are extant applications of behavioural tracking data, for example in car insurance, being used for risk assessment (McFall & Moor, 2018; Meyers, 2018) but the industry remains some way from the scenarios presented in the epigraphs. There are many sector and location specific reasons for this.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Personalizing solidarity? The role of self-tracking in health insurance pricing

McFall

2019

Economy and Society

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Can data-driven innovations, working across an internet of connected things, personalize health insurance prices? The emergence of self-tracking technologies and their adoption and promotion in health insurance products has been characterized as a threat to solidaristic models of healthcare provision. If individual behaviour rather than group membership were to become the basis of risk assessment, the social, economic and political consequences would be far-reaching. It would disrupt the distributive, solidaristic character that is expressed within all health insurance schemes, even in those nominally designated as private or commercial. Personalized risk pricing is at odds with the infrastructures that presently define, regulate and deliver health insurance. Self-tracking can be readily imagined as an element in an ongoing bio-political redistribution of the burden of responsibility from the state to citizens but it is not clear that such a scenario could be delivered within existing individual private health insurance operational and regulatory infrastructures. In what can be gleaned from publicly available sources discussing pricing experience in the individual markets established by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 2010 (ACA), widely known as ‘Obamacare’, it appears unlikely that it can provide the means to personalize price. Using the case of Oscar Health, a technology driven start-up trading in the ACA marketplaces, I explore the concepts, politics and infrastructures at work in health insurance markets.

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Who, or what, is insurtech personalizing?: persons, prices and the historical classifications of risk

Abstract: She co-edited Markets and the Arts of Attachment with Franck Cochoy and Joe Deville and is author of Devising Consumption: cultural economies of insurance, credit and spending (Routledge, 2014) and Advertising: a cultural economy (2004).

Cited by 53 publications

References 37 publications

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

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

Unlocking the payment experience: Future imaginaries in the case of digital payments

Personalizing solidarity? The role of self-tracking in health insurance pricing

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