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Driving innovation

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Ask? Participate?

Would you like to know more about the Innovation Platform, or hear about the possibilities to join us? Please contact Martijn Minkenberg, Innovation and strategic partnerships lead.

How do you stay relevant to the customer and how do you ensure the continuity of the business in the long term? Innovation plays a key role in this. Diverse opportunities and threats put pressure on the traditional business model of insurers.

For example:

  • Combating digital insurance crime
  • Insure and keep specific, sometimes new, risks insurable
  • Tapping into new technological possibilities
  • Continuously striving for maximum effectiveness and efficiency in the insurance chain

Het Verbond facilitates innovation

We offer the insurance industry opportunities to innovate faster, effectively and customer-oriented. The sector is working hard with opportunities such as cyber insurance, blockchain technology, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. The Association explicitly works in the non-competitive domain.

Support for the sector is based on three pillars:

  • The Association informs members and other interested parties about new trends and interprets them. Helpful in this is the Tech Trend Radar from MunichRe. Every year, MunichRE makes its radar transparent about what is coming to the sector and when and how trends are related to each other. This allows strategists, marketers, innovators, (risk) managers and ICT professionals in the insurance world to easily identify technological trends and estimate resources.
  • We expose obstacles in legislation and regulations and strive for standardization where possible.
  • We are looking for suitable partners to increase mutual knowledge and stimulate knowledge sharing.

"Alone you go faster, together you get further!" After all, some opportunities are best taken together and some challenges you prefer to take on together. Read more about it in the following paragraphs.

Partnerships

The Association likes to combine its knowledge and expertise - from Solvency II to big data and cybercrime - with those of partners, members, governments and all kinds of other organizations. By doing business together, we try to find solutions for social issues with our partners. Read more about partnerships and about the associate partnership.

Architectures

The Alliance helps its members and the sector to cope with changing circumstances by stimulating innovation. We have created various platforms for this and explicitly seek cooperation by entering into sponsorships and partnerships.

Youth Innovation Programme (JIP)

Every year we organize an intensive trajectory of about three months for young people working for insurance companies. They join forces to develop customer-oriented, future-proof innovations.

Platform InsurTech

In the InsurTech Platform , InsurTech parties and insurers consult and work together on (innovation) policy, supervision and the translation of policy into practice.

Innovation platform

The aim of the Innovation Platform is to quickly come up with innovative, good solutions for sectoral issues within existing themes. The platform currently consists of representatives of Achmea, Aegon, ARAG, a.s.r, De Goudse, Dela, Nationale-Nederlanden and Univé. Innovation is also anchored in all sector boards of the Association, because portfolio holders have been appointed who stimulate the achievement of the innovation objectives. The portfolio holders have defined a number of themes with their sector boards. This immediately gave a sharp focus. Moreover, the platform works with a fixed methodology. This allows us to steer, measure, assess and execute innovations step by step step if there is sufficient potential to make a sector-wide impact. This process works very efficiently, so that some use cases have already ended up in the pilot or even implementation phase.

Use cases Innovation platform

Since 2021, the innovation platform has been working on around ten use cases; some have already succeeded as pilots and are now being rolled out. We explain two use cases:

Damage-free years
Together with the Foundation for Efficient Processes for Non-Life Insurers (EPS), we looked at how claim-free years can be an efficient part of the acceptance process, and what could possibly be improved and in what way. In a pilot application of Verbond and EPS, damage-free years are calculated centrally and blockchain technology is used functionally.
Preventing absenteeism fraud
Tackling fraud is a social issue. By preventing fraud, we prevent bona fide customers from suffering from fraudsters. Fraudsters are not limited to one insurer. An example of this is the double claim of damage. The GDPR does not allow insurers to exchange data on claims with other insurers in order to detect fraudulent duplications. Privacy Enhancing Technology can facilitate this. This use case is already being implemented, starting with the double claim of illness on a collective absenteeism insurance with several insurers.
Last changed on: 11/07/2023