Digitalisation is a powerful means of building societal resilience

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The impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on food and energy prices is hurting households, businesses, and economies around the world. This, coming in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, has served as a reminder of how intricately connected and vulnerable our world really is. Amidst escalating geopolitical tensions and worsening climatic conditions, human society today faces more challenges and risks than it did at any time in the past. Digitalisation, however, provides the means for tackling many of these risks. Ever-increasing computing power and the availability of vast amounts of data can enable the detection, mitigation, and prediction of risks. With trust, ethics, and governance as its foundations, digitalisation can be very effective in closing protection gaps and making society resilient to natural and man-made crises. Technology-enabled reinsurance solutions, such as those focusing on crucial areas like health, life, agriculture, water supply, and disaster recovery, can help in reducing societal vulnerabilities. Let’s briefly examine how.

Life and Health: Many of the world’s poor and developing countries lack robust health infrastructure and witness high levels of out-of-pocket spending on healthcare. This makes them vulnerable to healthcare crises, as was recently evinced during the Covid-19 pandemic. Affordable health and life insurance can reduce the financial risks associated with such crises. Technology can make insurance accessible and affordable by optimising every step of the value chain, making processes more cost-efficient, and enabling prompt payout on claims. Magnum, Swiss Re GBS’ automated life insurance underwriting engine, helps life insurers reduce application times from weeks to minutes. The Claims Automated Rules Engine meanwhile enables automated risk assessments, claims triage, guidance for claim managers, and automated payment of claims.

Agriculture: Farmers are one of the most vital yet vulnerable communities in India, and their livelihood depends almost entirely on crop yield. The Bangla Shasya Bima crop insurance scheme introduced in West Bengal in 2022 has benefited almost 6 million of the 7.2 million farmers in the state. The scheme is unique because it takes Crop Health Factor as the assessment parameter and, unlike the manual data gathering methods in most states, uses remote sensing technology to measure indicators such as vegetation and rain to assess the health of crops.

Water supply: According to the World Health Organization, almost 2.2 billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water, which puts them at risk of disease. Projects aimed at providing them with clean drinking water thus contribute to preventing disease and easing the pressure on healthcare systems. Reinsurance can play an important role in enabling the successful implementation of such projects, as it did in Hemmathagama, Sri Lanka, where every village was provided with a water reservoir connected to a water treatment plant.

Natural disasters: The incidence and severity of natural catastrophes such as floods, earthquakes, storms, extreme temperatures, droughts, and landslides have increased sharply in recent years. Even as people struggle to cope with their loss from such events, insurance claims departments come under enormous pressure to deploy loss adjusters and handle a large number of claims efficiently and accurately. Swiss Re

GBS’ Rapid Damage Assessment enables claims managers to make fast, accurate decisions on such occasions. The system uses a combination of event data, natural catastrophe models, data enrichment, AI algorithms, and high-resolution aerial and synthetic aperture radar satellite imagery to yield property-level damage insights. This improves the loss adjustment process.

Swiss Re GBS leverages data and technology to develop digital solutions that mitigate global risks and benefit society. Swiss Re GBS India, the company’s analytical and innovation hub, is playing a key role in enhancing its competitiveness and relevance through R&D-focused initiatives, innovation, and analytics. Established in 2001, Swiss Re GBS India today has more than 1600 employees and is the third largest office location for the Swiss Re Group. It has established itself as a centre of excellence across the entire business value chain. Work, here, has a purpose – to not only create new revenue streams for the company but also make the world more resilient by developing solutions that protect people and businesses.

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