IFZ InsurTech Report 2021

The first edition of the IFZ InsurTech Report provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of active InsurTechs in Europe. It also includes a detailed assessment of the growing Swiss InsurTech landscape. The report is based on a database, which has been jointly compiled by HITS House of InsurTech Switzerland and the Institute of Financial Services Zug IFZ. Across Europe, we identified a total of 497 InsurTechs that seek to enrich the insurance market with innovative products and services. In order to provide a structured overview, we classify each startup according to our proposed InsurTech grid, based on the part of the value chain they serve and the technology area they specialise in. The analysis of the 497 InsurTechs shows that regarding the value chain, 42 percent of the companies are allocated to Infrastructure, 30 percent to Marketing & Distribution, 15 percent to Claims & Customer Service, and 13 percent to Product Development, Pricing & Underwriting. Only one company, or 0.20 percent of the sample, was identified in the Asset Management value chain area. With regard to technology, the analysis underlines that most InsurTechs in Europe focus primarily on either Process Digitisation/Automatisation/Robotics or Analytics/Artificial Intelligence, which account for 63 and 30 percent, respectively. Four percent specialise in Internet of Things and three percent in Distributed Ledger Technology. To date, there is no startup applying concepts of Quantum Computing. It remains to be seen whether certain companies will shift their focus more towards this technology in the future. Within Europe, the Swiss InsurTech hub appears to be of considerable importance. Out of 31 countries, Switzerland is home to the fourth most InsurTech companies. Looking at the number of companies in relation to the number of inhabitants, Switzerland is even the country with the third most InsurTechs per capita. A comparison with European InsurTechs reveals some differences, but also some similarities: While Swiss companies are proportionally more represented in the value chain category Marketing & Distribution, the relative number of companies in the category Infrastructure is lower than in Europe. In contrast, the Swiss InsurTech hub seems to show similar patterns in terms of growth in the number of incorporations per year and the customer segments they serve.