The Impact of Digitalization Risks on the Business Processes of an Insurance Company

Nowadays digitalization is one of the key drivers of insurance market development in Russia. Introducing InsurTech provides insurance companies with a number of competitive advantages, such as increasing speed of making decisions, opportunities for portfolio expansion, tools for risk assessment and fraud detection. Application of digital technologies helps them to increase effectiveness of business processes. Among all business processes of an insurance company we emphasize the most significant in terms of insurance service provision. Those include the processes of underwriting, conclusion and support of an insurance contract, settlement of an insured event. However, adoption of innovations blurs borders between business processes. The paper discusses InsurTech tools implemented in these business processes, evaluates the effectiveness of their use, identifies the associated risks. The conclusion is made that the risk of unauthorized access or use of personal data is the most significant. Another significant risk is the model risk arising from the imperfection of the models used, insufficient data or its poor quality. In addition to that, the impact of digitalization on the activities of insurance companies and its business processes should not be overestimated. Funding: The reported study was funded by RFBR, project number 20-01-00785.