Bruce Bentley

  Imagine insurance customers who actually enjoy meeting with their insurance broker. Customers who see insurance not as a nuisance mandate but as an integral part of their own and their customers’ success. Insurance buyers who are enthusiastic about discussing risks and coverages regularly, not just begrudgingly once a year. Customers who are eager to share data on safety and performance. Or customers who view insurance not as a cost but as a revenue builder. These insurance customers do exist. Some of them come from the sharing economy and three of them recently shared their experiences with insurance in a Lloyd’s of London webinar titled The Sharing Economy. Host Rosie Denee, Innovation and Thought Leadership manager at Lloyd’s, stressed how the pandemic has recalibrated the sharing economy of independent contractors, entrepreneurs, service providers, drivers, property owners, renters, riders and buyers and the technology platforms they love. “Companies have had to adapt to cha...

“The sharing economy looks different from the typical corporate risk. You build your claims tools and your actuarial data. They need to be dynamic and work in-house or with a TPA to get the information right to the point, ”said Laura Langone of Airbnb. (Photo credit: Daniel Dror / Shutterstock) Companies like Uber, Instacart, and Airbnb have radically changed the way consumers view certain industries. These emerging and constantly developing companies also have special insurance needs and demand flexibility from the industry. Laura Langone, Head of Insurance at Airbnb, noted the tremendous opportunity these companies offer insurers: “The sharing economy is not disappearing and is evolving. We've seen it with Uber, and we've seen it with home sharing and many other goods and services. " The needs of the companies that make up the sharing economy are each unique. This, according to Langone, makes it a little harder to find a cover than simply going out on the m...

In his groundbreaking 2013 book Tomorrow's Lawyers, legal futurist Richard Susskind predicted that technology would radically transform the legal profession over the next few decades. From the automation of routine legal tasks to the emergence of new legal service providers to the virtualization of personal proceedings, Susskind's assessments of the likely development of the legal profession have proven to be amazingly accurate. Except maybe for the slow pace of change. After Susskind established a strong business model for why the legal profession should take advantage of the wider use of technology, he couldn't have expected a global pandemic in 2020 to get the legal profession to exploit the disruptive potential of technology in to transform an everyday life into reality. The COVID-19 pandemic is a wake-up call for companies and industries that are falling behind in the digital transformation. For the legal profession, the pandemic is an opportunity to break away ...