Because we like to keep ourselves abreast of what’s going on in the insurance industry, we happed across a post from Comperemedia purporting to identify three emerging trends. They are:

1. Ecosystems Expanding
2. Brands as a Life Coach
3. Beyond the Screen as We Know It.

We don’t know what any of those things are supposed to mean. So, we looked up Comperemedia. According to its parent company, Mintel, Comperemedia is:

The complete and expert source of product-level data and insight in direct marketing. We monitor acquisition strategies, pricing, targeted offers and product introductions from our rolling and lifecycle panels in five channels for the US and Canada.

As if pedestrians don’t have enough to worry about already, now we have to be wary of rolling panels. But that’s not what confused us the most.

Say What?

What really caused us to scratch our heads was this, under trend #1 above:

In the face of ongoing pandemic concerns like inflation, exponential increases in product offerings and choices, and limited out-of-home experiences, consumers will demand control via stability, simplified choices, and fresh entertainment experiences.

We could understand how and why inflation might be a pandemic concern. We got the fact that exponential increases in product offerings might cause curiosity, if not concern. We share people’s concerns about limited out-of-home experiences. And we’re right there with the desire for stability and simplified choices. Give us simple coverage choices from a stable company, and we’re good to go.

But we have to admit to being stymied by fresh entertainment experiences. At first we thought it might be a typo. It’s easy enough to imagine typographical errors of one, two, or maybe even 10 characters. But 30? That felt like a stretch. Even when we had to type The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog in our high school typing class, blindfolded, we didn’t make that many typos. Then we thought maybe the folks at Comperemedia believed consumers wanted to be entertained by the insurance they buy. We enjoy all of the insurance protection we’ve purchased in our lives. But we can’t recall having been entertained by any of it.

The Fine Print?

We may or may not call the folks at Comperemedia to find out what they’re on about. But in the meantime, we’re going to play closer attention to the fine print in our insurance policies.

We can’t stand the thought that we may be missing something.

Sorry. We couldn’t resist making the title of this post as sensational as possible. But we did find a headline that intrigued us. It was this, from Insurance Business America: “Wisconsin Supreme Court rules against insurance coverage for COVID losses:”

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday, June 1, that businesses are not entitled to insurance coverage for losses resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and related public safety restrictions … “One may think of the business-income provision as indirect loss-of-use coverage, but that does not change the fact that a prerequisite for that provision is still a direct physical loss or damage.”

And then we found the Supreme Courts of and Massachusetts and Iowa handed down similar rulings. Here’s the intriguing part: Loss-of-income insurance can cover revenues lost due to property losses. Disability insurance can cover wages lost by individuals due to illness or injury. COVID-19 clearly didn’t result in property damage. And few if any disability writers could have foreseen a global pandemic.

But the bigger question to us, it seems, is what happens when wages are lost due to governmental decisions to shut down entire segments of an economy? Wow. Talk about unforeseen circumstances.

Uncharted Territory

We’ve now been contending with COVID for about 28 months. That may seem like a long time. But the insurance industry works in mysterious ways. Developing insurance coverages at all requires huddling with actuaries, writing new products, testing them, rating them, underwriting them, pricing them, getting them approved by State DOIs, marketing them, selling them, and more. Compound all that with the vagaries of a global pandemic (or any other unforeseen disaster) and we’re working without experience, to say nothing of maps, compasses, and guide dogs.

Yes, these court decisions against COVID losses seem harsh and heartless, at least as they pertain to the interests of policyholders. But they’re learning experiences. We now know at least some of what we didn’t know before the pandemic. We can apply that knowledge in anticipation of future eventualities and to write contingencies into protections and limits against future uncertainties.

The most consistent thing ripped from the headlines these days is uncertainty.

We’re all doing our best to live with it.

On October 22, 2015, MIT Technology Review published a piece called, “Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill”.

It’s hard to imagine the degree of academic detachment required to reduce a philosophical quandary to the level of computer programming and to anthropomorphize said computer and the programs it runs to the extent that a life-and-death scenario could be blithely characterized as:

an impossible ethical dilemma of algorithmic morality.

But that’s exactly what happened because:

Jean-Francois Bonnefon at the Toulouse School of Economics in France and a couple of pals … say that even though there is no right or wrong answer to these questions, public opinion will play a strong role in how, or even whether, self-driving cars become widely accepted.

And professor Bonnefon and his fellow academics concluded:

People are in favor of cars that sacrifice the occupant to save other lives—as long they don’t have to drive one themselves.

After reading that article, we found ourselves walking, biking, and taking public transportation for fear of coming up on the short end to some algorithmic morality controlling a self-driving killing machine. But we eventually got over ourselves.

Fast Forward

Since then, of course, self-driving cars have become all the rage, with some predicable results. Nevertheless, the May/June edition of NU Claims features an article entitled, “Autonomous Vehicles: Predictions vs. Truth”. The article said this, in part:

Autonomous technology doesn’t just apply to private passenger vehicles. With the shortage of truck drivers, having autonomous technology would allow goods to be moved across the country on a 24-hour basis. The autonomous trucks could keep moving without the need to stop for drivers to rest … the size of the vehicle and the logistics of turning and navigating in traffic bring a different element to the task at hand.

When we read that, we couldn’t help thinking of the 1971 Steve Spielberg film, Duel. In a latter-day version, of course, the truck wouldn’t be driven by a dude with terminal road rage. Rather, it would be directed an algorithmic morality programmed to kill. We’ve come a long way, baby.

After reading the article, we couldn’t decide who we’d least like to be: The guy who comes up on the short end of a car programmed to kill. The actuaries who have to work with algorithmic morality to calculate risk probabilities. Or the underwriters who have to throw darts at the wall to determine risk levels until there’s enough claims history to rate and price coverages with any reasonable degree of plausibility, to say nothing of profitability.

This is the kind of thing that give the phrase, brave new world, entirely new meaning.

In the middle of March, Insurance Thought Leadership published a post called, “‘No-Code’ Goes Mainstream”. The post offered this time-sensitive admonition:

It’s time to take a hard look at no-code–generating computer programs without the need for programmers–which could streamline business processes and slash costs … No-code takes programming to the next level [no indication of what level we’re on now], because it lets even us non-technical types do that sort of grabbing of objects to assemble apps that make computers do what we want them to do — without having to wait for the IT department to have resources for us and without having to translate our current processes and our desires into some language that they can turn into code.

Like cloud computing (as we suggested in our previous post), much of the hard looking is already being done or has been done.

OOPs

The grabbing of objects mentioned in the Insurance Thought Leadership post refers to object-oriented programming (OOP), which develops software programs as simple, reusable pieces of code blueprints (usually called classes) that are used to create individual instances of objects, rather than necessitating the repetition of individual lines of code. While OOP wasn’t new in the immediate aftermath of Y2K, it was more widely adopted thereafter, along with programming languages like Python and Ruby, as suggested in this historical artifact, which says this, in part:

In particular, the newer generation of programmers wasn’t looking back into the labyrinth of COBOL, ForTran, DB2, and other ancient procedural languages. Rather, they were looking ahead into the as-yet unstructured lexicon of declarative query languages like SQL, JavaScript, and the programming equivalent of Esperanto-XML-that permitted greater functional literacy.

Since that artifact was published almost 22 years ago, it can’t come as any surprise that no-code programming has also been around for a while.

What’s In a Name

To make an arguably self-serving point, our Design Studio offers users no-code/low-code for implementation of the Finys Suite. It’s the exact same toolset our developers and designers use. It enables insurers to be self-sufficient, responsive, and competitive by letting them design and configure their own products. It also lets business users and IT departments collaborate to design, configure, and manage the Suite — as well as states and lines of business — more quickly and less expensively.

Maybe we could have called it No-Code Studio. But Design Studio sounds more elegant. And yes, it’s in the cloud.

As Ted Nugent would say, “Ya gotta love that.”

Those of you who aren’t mathematically inclined may not be aware of the fact that today, March 14 (3.14), is International Pi (π) Day.

Pi is a mathematical constant — derived from the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — roughly equal to 3.14159; although, its decimal representation never settles into a permanently repeating pattern and is allegedly infinite. We say allegedly infinite because that’s never been factually proven. With one exception, everyone who’s attempted the proof has died of old age. The exception was Wilbur Freemish from Baked, Alaska. Wilbur’s wife, Agnes, found him unresponsive at his desk. The autopsy revealed he’d aspirated some seeds from a slice of raspberry pie he was eating as he calculated.

When Agnes was brought into Police HQ for a preliminary interview, she blurted out, “It serves the chooch right. All he ever did was play with those damn numbers!” Agnes was never considered a suspect in Wilbur’s demise. But her statement wouldn’t have mattered, either way, because the cops weren’t recording the interview or listening to Agnes. They were working on their own decimal representations for pi.

Oops

At any rate, due to poor communication and current supply-chain shortages, the first announcement of International Pi Day caused a panicked market run on apples, peaches, blueberries, strawberries, rhubarb, chocolate, custard, banana cream, lemon meringue, and key limes. There were no shortages of mince, of course, because no one actually likes mince pie.

On hearing of the confusion, the International Mathematical Union issued the following statement:

It is with deep regret that we acknowledge the besmirching of our beloved π. Without it, the areas and circumferences of innumerable circles would remain unknown to us to this very day. As a boon to trigonometry and physics, π has spawned countless formulae, especially as they pertain to ellipses and spheres. Let it be noted, as well, that pi occurs in various mathematical problems involving the lengths of arcs or other curves, the areas of sectors and other curved surfaces, and the volumes of many solids. It’s used in various formulae to describe such periodic phenomena as the motion of pendulums, the vibration of strings, and alternating electric currents. And in the field of entertainment, π was a foundational element in classic performances of the Three Stooges.

No matter how you choose to celebrate International Pi Day, we hope you enjoy it.

But watch out for the raspberry seeds.