Ethics and Insurance

I help insurers achieve greater certainty on ethical issues, both present and emerging. I have a reputation for foresight, pragmatism and independent thinking, particularly around data ethics. You can keep in touch with my analysis through my free weekly ‘Ethics and Insurance’ newsletter. Join below
Ethics and Insurance
What I do

Insight

I help insurers understand developments in insurance from an ethical perspective and the options open to them. My analysis delivers an extra level of understanding from an independent perspective
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Critical Friend

Insurers face some ethical challenges at the moment – I’ve been tracking them for several years. My role as a critical friend helps them to reality check their thinking and turn a situation into a plan.
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Horizon Scanning

I’ve been an influential figure in analysing the implications of digital insurance for several years now. Through workshops and research, my ethics radar highlights the problems and opportunities to look out for.
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Latest posts
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Underwriting 4 min read

Challenges Emerge for Insurance and Wellness Products

‘Moving beyond insurance’ is a popular digital trend across many markets. Why just deal with losses when you can prevent claims, goes the narrative. Yet one regulatory move means insurers will soon have to design and sell their cover / wellness combination with great care.…
Duncan Minty
Duncan Minty
Autonomy 6 min read

Why Insurers Need to Respect Customer Autonomy

Autonomy is both simple and complex, ephemeral yet ever present. It’s rarely invoked in an insurance context outside of self-driving vehicles. Yet it’s an ethical issue that is becoming central to the debate on how insurance is to be priced. Insurers need to understand it to be part of that debate.…
Duncan Minty
Duncan Minty
Data Ethics 5 min read

Assessing the Risk from Algorithm Destruction

We’ve seen a couple of cases now in which firms have been told by regulators to destroy not only the data they shouldn’t have been using, but also the algorithms and models that had been trained on that data. So are insurers at risk from this too, and if so, how can they begin to assess it?…
Duncan Minty
Duncan Minty
Data Ethics 3 min read

Whose data should an insurer trust?

Whose data should an insurer trust? Data provided by consumers, or data supplied by the insurer’s data broker? A prominent data broker to the UK market is saying that their data is accurate and can be trusted; and that the same cannot be said of data provided by the consumer. Are they correct?…
Duncan Minty
Duncan Minty
Fairness 3 min read

Insurance as a Common Good

Could insurance be considered as a form of common good? And if so, how might that have come about? And more importantly, how might it influence the way in which insurance markets are allowed to digitally transform?…
Duncan Minty
Duncan Minty
Underwriting 3 min read

Moving from Healthcare Data to Lifestyle Data

With the EU proposing to ban the secondary use of electronic health data for insurance purposes, the sector was always going to be looking for other ways to rate life and health risk. And a recent paper by an executive at Swiss Re illustrates gives some insight into how this is being addressed.…
Duncan Minty
Duncan Minty
Data Ethics 3 min read

Sentiment Analysis – Treat with Caution

The increase in remote working triggered by the pandemic caused Zoom to become a popular tool for holding meetings and speaking with clients. Now Zoom is to allow account holders to carry out sentiment analysis on those they are engaging with. I explore what it means for insurers.…
Duncan Minty
Duncan Minty
Leadership on Ethics 2 min read

Pay Attention to Undue Pressure

How a person responds to the ethics of a situation will be influenced by several things. Character is one, plus the skills and knowledge they’ve learnt. Yet what can sometimes render all these ineffective is something firmly in the hands of the firm’s leadership. It’s undue pressure.…
Duncan Minty
Duncan Minty
Underwriting 4 min read

Is Adverse Selection being Replaced by Inverse Selection?

Insurers have long been concerned about adverse selection. They see today’s data and analytics as helping them reduce their exposure to it. Yet that explosion of data and analytics could not just reduce adverse selection, but flip it over, creating what is being called inverse selection.…
Duncan Minty
Duncan Minty
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