The Future of Insurance – Paige Halam-Andres, Managing Director, Innovation, Highline Beta

Paige leads Highline Beta's Corporate Innovation group that works at the intersection between venture capital, startups and enterprises businesses. Her background is in using qualitative, quantitative and behavioral research to shape and build new companies, products and services. During her time at Highline Beta she's worked with numerous Insurance firms to think through investing in innovation or spinning out new ventures.

Highlights from the Show

• Highline Beta is a hybrid corporate innovation studio and venture capital investor that works with corporate partners to help bring ideas they are working on to fruition internally or as a standalone business, in the US and Canada
• Insurance is interesting to Paige because of the constraints itself, which present interesting things to work around and through, which pushes for great moments of innovation
• Some themes they have worked on include
  • Embedded insurance, for example helping an existing carrier allow its idea for embedded to develop outside of their core so it could move faster and more freely and get to market
  • Technical themes like AI (and, yes, GenAI) and how it can be used, especially internally, to improve how we work and the results we can achieve, whether on expenses or losses
• A major challenge to insurance innovation is the data we have and have access to, and doing so in a way that respects privacy, both legally and for people's comfort levels
• There are differences between the US and Canada, like how Canadians don't have to buy health insurance and how each state in the US has different rules and regulations, which can complicate deploying a single approach to an idea across the country
• For AI, we're still at the early stages of implementation, which are largely around making incremental improvements, especially around efficiency
  • To reach a five or 10 year outlook, that will take changing a lot of the internal systems, both technical and operationally, around, for example, whether a process has any human interaction at all (like the handling of a claim), and how to enable that
• Looking ahead, connecting products, data and consumers will lead to better insurance products that better meet people's needs, but also allows us to start to make meaningful progress on the Predict & Prevent notions we hear a lot of talk around today

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance book series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes.

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.