The adoption of Big Data analytics (BDA) in insurance has been
controversial but there has been little analysis specifying exactly 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 paper situates disruptive innovations,
particularly the experimental practices of behaviour-based
personalisation, in the context of the practice and regulation of
contemporary insurance. I, with the help of a group of insurance
scholars, argue that behaviour-based personalisation has different and
broader implications than have yet been appreciated. BDA is 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.
Dr Liz McFall is
Director of Data Civics and Chancellor’s Fellow based in the Edinburgh
Futures Institute and Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. She is a
sociologist of markets with a particular interest in how markets for
difficult products succeed (and how they fail). Her current research
focuses on the impact of data-driven innovations in insurance and in
civic regeneration and place-making. She is co-founder of AWED,
a collective that make films and installations exploring the
orchestration of civic sentiments and data techniques most recently Closes and Opens: a history of Edinburgh’s Futures.